Kissing as Telling: Some Thoughts on the Cultural History of Media Performance

Much of my research has involved the analysis of types of performance as they have developed through history and moved between media forms and genres. My experience with that type of work has convinced me of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary dialogue between Performance Studies and Media Studies. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of all the possible synergies between these disciplines, but let me briefly mention two. First, the analysis of performance can help scholars to study the dynamics of trans- or intermediality—the relationships among media forms. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes that, since performance "lacks a distinctive medium," Performance Studies "starts from the premise that its objects of study are not to be divided up and parceled out, medium by medium."¹ Second, the study of performance is inherently concerned with process and change, with the relationship between tradition and innovation, between the doing and the already done.² Performance Studies can thus provide methodological tools for scholars embarking on what Rick Altman calls a "performer-oriented" approach to media history. Altman reminds us that nineteenth-century American entertainment was organized around acts and the people who performed them, as opposed to media products, and he suggests that film scholars must put aside a "firmly entrenched film-oriented approach to cinema in favor of a performer-oriented position."³ A performer-oriented or performance-oriented approach has much to offer media historians, but it is not without its challenges. How does one engage in a cultural history of media performance? What are the relevant historical documents in such a project? Does a turn to media performance amount to "formalist retrenchment," making it a "particularly conservative subsection" of historical scholarship that allows scholars to "continue to look at film form" while "ticking the box of locating film in its discourse networks"?⁴ Is it possible to take performance as a focus of study and remain committed to situating media culture in its larger social and historical contexts? How can we go beyond the observation that identity is performed so as to locate the specific mechanics of those performances? What are the relevant points of articulation between media performances and everyday interaction (that is, between performance and performativity)? This essay addresses some of those questions through a historical case study having to do with what J. A. Sokalski has called "performed affection."⁵

Thomas Edison's 1896 film The May Irwin Kiss is an archetypal instance of modern media performance. The kissing scene between May Irwin and John C. Rice was taken from the popular play The Widow Jones, and film scholars have approached it by considering the contrast between stage and screen. Taking a performer-oriented approach to May Irwin's career can yield even more insights. Charles Musser notes that the kissing scene in The Widow Jones was not initially mentioned in the play's promotion, with emphasis placed instead on Irwin's "witty lines" and songs: "May Irwin's personality and her singing, particular her Negro or 'Coon' songs, were selling the show."⁶ It is thus somewhat surprising that media historians have failed to examine a set of media texts that, unlike the Edison film, captured Irwin's renowned vocal delivery: a series of phonograph records that Irwin made for the Victor Talking Machine Company in May 1907. These recordings not only add a voice to a famous cinematic image but, when they are combined with other popular recordings from this time, also point to ways in which a performance-oriented approach can supplement more medium-oriented histories.

Such an approach to turn-of-the-century enactments of performed affection brings the phonograph into the conversation between stage and screen, and thus potentially brings nuance to both theoretical models and historical narratives. Sokalski argues that Irwin was particularly popular with female audiences who relished her stage performances for their enactment of power and control. Sokalski compares The May Irwin Kiss to Edison's 1900 follow-up, The New Kiss, and he concludes that "female actors underwent marked loss of personal control of their sexual...