When I opened facebok this morning the first two posts were about a new kissing video. Director Tatia Pileva asked 20 people to kiss a stranger in front of her camera and created a nice little composition with the footage. It’s black and white, has somewhat romantic music and begins with the „couples“ meeting fort he first time. It’s cute and got me thinking about great film kisses.
So I decided to drop my plan to review Gravity (which I thought was AMAZING!) and go with a little tale of kissing instead…
The video trending today ist his black and white piece:
Which immediately reminded me of this art project from by Anne Sorrentino:
But now on to the movie scenes.
In a world where porn like scenes in film are no rarity (just think Nymp()maniac, 9 songs, Shortbus, Intimacy etc.) it is hard to imagine that a kiss on a silverscreen was once uncommon. When Thomas Alva Edison showed The Kiss in 1896 it became both a hit film (the 40 second film ran as a loop) and a huge scandal.
Of course kissing in public wasn’t acceptable back in those days ,thus it’s understandable it was new and scary to some. But luckily films change with the world and we later got to see plenty of kissing. For a long time kisses were commonly shown, but the hint at sexuality present in the cinema.
The importance of a kiss was significant, as it suggested all that would follow. They were emotionally charged and would usually end in a dissolve, suggesting they went on and on. Watching the great kisses from the 50s and 60s today, they certainly seem staged and overacted, but try to look at them in the context of the times: they are actually pretty fabulous.
Kim Novak and James Stewart in Hitchcocks classic Vertigo (1958)
Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in Fred Zinnemanns From Here To Eternity (1953)
And then of course there were the 90s and the kisses I grew up with. It was all more erotic and explicit in those days and some of those kisses certainly are very present in my mind
The very first kiss in Howard Zieffs My Girl (1991)
The Dirty Dancing (1987) classic
Leonardo DiCaprio and Caire Danes in Luhrmanns Romeo and Juliet (1997)
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on Camerons the Titanic (1997)
And a little later Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Ang Lees Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Now it’s your turn!
What are your favourite kissing scenes?
And for those who just cannot get enough. You should follow the kissing blog from France called too many kisses.
