American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures

INTRODUCTION: LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

The John C. Rice–May Irwin Kiss (1896, William Heise), later known simply as The Kiss, is believed to be the first sex act captured by the cinema (Linda Williams, Screening Sex, 27). For most of the film’s brief running time, the famous actors build anticipation for the embrace promised by the film’s simple title.¹ They press their cheeks together lovingly and utter what appear to be “sweet nothings.” Then, in the final seconds of the film, Rice pulls away from Irwin, twiddles his mustache, grabs her face as she turns toward him, and kisses her on the mouth.² The Kiss is hardly an erotic spectacle; indeed, its stars seem to be more amused than amorous as they cuddle and then kiss. But the film was unprecedented in offering audiences an opportunity not just to see a man and a woman kiss, but also to see this act in a medium close-up, a viewing position that would have been improper in real life. The Kiss’s strategic use of the medium close-up allowed for what Linda Williams has described as the “anatomization” of the sex act; the film provided voyeurs with a socially acceptable venue for examining the previously intimate, hidden act of kissing (Screening Sex, 27). It should not be surprising then that The Kiss was one of the earliest films to generate calls for censorship of the medium (Lewis, American Film, 24); one Chicago journalist, Herbert Stone, described the film as “absolutely disgusting” and demanded “police interference ” (quoted in Dave Thompson, Black and White, 21). The moral outcry over the film is also one of the reasons why The Kiss was the most popular film produced by Thomas Edison’s company that year (Auerbach , “Valentine Day’s Feature”). The success of The Kiss spawned a series of imitators, each offering its own unique variation on the subject of kissing, including The Soldier’s Courtship (1896, Alfred Moul and Robert W. Paul), The AmINTRODUCTION LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT 2 AMERICAN FILM CYCLES orous Guardsman (1898, British Mutoscope and Biograph Company), and Tommy Atkins in the Park (1898, Robert W. Paul). Once the financial viability of films depicting kissing was proved, early filmmakers capitalized on this successful subject by finding more creative ways to stage on-screen kisses; The Kiss is merely the image of a man and a woman kissing, while Hanging Out the Clothes (1897, G. A. Smith) stages the same events among drying garments. The proliferation of these kissing films highlights how the representation and display of sexuality was an important aspect of early cinema and its appeal (Linda Williams, Screening Sex, 27). In addition to kissing films, early cinema audiences also enjoyed short films that captured the movement of trains entering and exiting the film frame, such as Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat (1895, Auguste and Louis Lumiére). Filmmakers also mounted cameras onto the sides of moving trains in order to capture the movement of locomotives through space. These “phantom rides,” as they were called, placed the viewer in the perspective of a passenger on a train. Films depicting trains and train movement brought together two emblems of modernity—mass transportation and the cinema. These symbols of modernity—like the city itself —were simultaneously frightening and fascinating to audiences of the time.³ The Kiss (1896) offered audiences the first opportunity to see a sex act up close. 3 LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT Given the success of on-screen kisses and phantom train rides as subjects in early cinema, it is not surprising that in 1899, the British filmmaker G. A. Smith decided to unite these two very popular, though seemingly unrelated, short film subjects in The Kiss in the Tunnel . In this brief film, a man takes advantage of the darkness created when the train enters a tunnel in order to kiss his female companion. The Kiss in the Tunnel established a viable new formula in early cinema , with imitators like The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899, James Banforth), Love in a Railroad Train (1902, S. Lubin), and What Happened in the Tunnel (1903, Edwin S. Porter) released in response. This new formula was so successful that one British film distributor, the Warwick Trading Company, offered film exhibitors the brief shot of a couple kissing inside a train car, which could be spliced into footage they had already purchased of trains exiting and...