Written by A.O. Scott
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreader: Qin Tian
Source: The New York Times (December 10, 2014)
To whom is your "first kiss on screen" dedicated? Are the kissing dogs in "Mademoiselle and the Tramp" — when their lips are accidentally pasted together through a stick of spaghetti? Or the scene in Titanic where Jack and Rose are in the boiler room? Jack and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain? Cher and Nicolas Cage in Moonlight? Or go back to an earlier, more disciplined era— with or without the testimony of a priest, on-screen couples can only reach the scale of kissing at most.
The Lady and the Tramp (1955)
Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca? Bergman and Gary Grant in "The Beauty Plan"? Was it Grant and Eva Mary Szent, or Grace Kelly, Catherine Hepburn? How do you feel disgusting? Bored? sexy? romantic? Does it get in the way of what you want to do, or is that exactly what you want to see? Have you learned anything about your own desires or the techniques of achieving them? Have you been moved to imitate the picture on the screen, perhaps with the person sitting next to you in the dark? Can you still watch it?
Spirit and Flesh (1926)
These are all questions of uncertainty that plague each generation of theatergoers and Internet surfers in different ways, dating back to the days of nickelodeon, the common name for American cinemas in the early days of the film industry, named after the fact that admission costs only a five-cent nickel. Maybe movies didn't invent kissing, but I suspect that in the 20th century, movies made kissing even more important.
There's no denying that movies — especially Hollywood movies, but much more than that — make kissing more visible. They built charming portraits and elegant choreography, whereas in real life kissing was often a sloppy, clumsy, and less perfect experience.
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Of course, that's where the fun comes in. But real kisses are invisible to the person kissing. If for some reason you keep your eyes open, what you see may be a blurry bridge of the nose (your own?). his? her? ), a wisp of flowing hair, a piece of ceiling, a sidewalk or dashboard. But the camera has an incredible power to reveal unseen intimacy, frame and depict feelings of madness as we know it.
In other words, whatever the kiss is, it's first and foremost a formal challenge for filmmakers. The camera adores the faces of the characters. The deification of cinematic art, that is, (as the wiser critics of mine put it) approaching the divine state, is the close-up, which gives an aesthetic dignity and an ontological gravitational force to one's face. Great movie stars aren't necessarily the most talented actors or the best-looking people, but their eyes, mouths, and cheekbones will shine in two-dimensional images. Their magic lies in their uniqueness.
Titanic (1997)
What happens when you put two people together? In 1896, Thomas Edison made a 25-second short film in which the first kissing scene in the history of cinema clearly illustrates the problem. The man and woman in the frame sit together, they look like a gentle couple, and the interaction between the two is more of a joke than a sincere admiration.
He showed him on the side, and she snuggled up to him with her face to him and at a 45-degree angle to the camera. The first time they tried kissing, they interrupted a steady (of course silent) conversation, a strange surprise attack from the side. As she continued to look into the camera, their lips met. Then he suddenly moved away, brushed his impressive beard, turned her face to himself, and then leaned over and covered her mouth.
Four years later, Edison made another short film — shot perfectly indoors, almost like an early YouTube movie — showing similar visual and performance dynamics. The couple was younger and more lively than the previous couple, alternating between cheek-to-cheek and mouth-to-mouth intimacy, as well as between self-awakening and infatuation. The man winked at the camera and raised an eyebrow. The smiling woman, looking to the side, seemed to avoid the camera's gaze.
Kisses are becoming more frequent and hugs more passionate, making viewers wonder what will happen next, perhaps not for the first time, certainly not the last, raising the possibility of being flirtatious – and for some, perhaps worrying – that the public may be inspired by watching the film.
The Beauty Count (1946)
However, filmmakers have to address some practical issues. The main thing that has already been revealed in Edison's short films is that the dynamic of kissing will cover the face, hiding the expressive face behind the curtain-like hair or the shadow cast by the chin and forehead. The development of editing technology will solve this problem to some extent.
The director no longer lets two kissers unnaturally turn or move away from each other, so that the camera can fully record their fluctuating and increasing emotions by observing their eyes and mouths, and the picture can switch back and forth between the two. The classic technique of contrasting shots — where two people face each other, followed by a close-up of each person, followed by a close-up of two people — is perfect for kissing scenes.
Casablanca (1942)
In the silent film era, you can still see a lot of turns in and out, and the cheeks of the two are pressed together as frequently and excitedly as mouths, but as the film matures, they find a rhythm that is both simple and flexible. When we see a close-up of a couple's single face, they're not looking at us, they're looking at each other. Once they kiss, their faces disappear and we're not just watching what's going on; we're also in it.
But kissing in film is not just a matter of form, but also about plane, shadow and editing. At almost the same moment when Edison made the short film, Sigmund Freud, another founder of modern consciousness, interpreted a strange and contradictory force—a kiss full of meaning.
If Edison and the Lumière brothers in France invented the machine of collective dreaming at the same time, then Freud wrote the instructions. Indeed, kissing occupies less space in his vocabulary than in Hollywood chronicles; and his theories of sex focus on certain aspects—genitals, the subconscious—that cameras are reluctant or unprepared to represent.
In Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis—there is a chapter devoted to the general theory of neuroses—he uses kisses to complicate the distinction between "normal" and "abnormal" sex, that is, on the one hand, heterosexual intercourse is intended to reproduce; on the other hand, almost everything else is included. Kissing is the main evidence of his argument that this distinction is too simple: "Even a kiss can be described as an anomaly," he asserts, "because it involves the touch of two mouths rather than the union of two sexual organs." However, no one considers this to be abnormal; on the contrary, in theatrical performances, it is allowed as a gentle hint of sexuality."
Whatever the place of Freud's insight over the theory of human sexuality, there is no doubt that he points in passing to an incredible moral flaw in his time that will only get bigger in the next century. Kissing was allowed as a hint of "sexuality" that could not be directly expressed; due to enhancements in lighting, makeup, close-up, and clipping techniques, it was broader and more allusive in film than hints on stage.
For a long time, under various formal and informal censorship, a kiss in a movie could replace everything. A kiss is all the sexual activity you can show on screen, and that's what turns a special, non-sexually instrumental sexual act into all that sexual desire is, satisfying Freud's definition of sexual perversion.
The Mysterious Woman (1928)
Now, any online video of imaginable sex comes with several carefully chosen search terms, and we sometimes see old movies as a product of an era of innocence, repression. But it may be more accurate to say that they are a force that reduces us all to perverts, secretly carrying private work through silent hints.
In the early days of the sound film era, the hypocrites who wrote the Hayes Code to limit Hollywood's early obscenity must have doubted this. Realizing that they could not control every picture and scene, they demanded "more attention" to some sensitive areas, including "excessive or lascivious kissing, especially if one of the characters is a 'serious' image."
The (1926)
But the desire and excesses in the eyes of the bystander, the imagination and emotions projected onto the screen for the viewer are much more than the beams of light through the film are exposed. A kiss isn't just another mischievous and cheerful sign of purity—nor is it just a socially accepted symbol of a child-rearing marital relationship. It's an inducing drug that literally proves that those who scold have always been right.
Movies have always been inseparable from sex, and have always provided tools for sexual enlightenment under the cover of harmless entertainment. This is an open secret. The entertainment industry, viewers, and critics conspired to pretend that the reason for the existence of this art form was something other than pornography. Of course, movies can do a lot of noble and inspiring things, but when we sit in soft chairs, in the dark, surrounded by strangers, other emotions can easily be induced. But every once in a while someone would sprinkle popcorn.
Blue Bridge (1940)
In his poem Ave Maria, Frank O'Hara exhorts "American mothers to let their children go to the movies!" The first reason is to give moms a chance to pursue their own adult interests: "Get kids out of the house so they don't know what you're doing." But they will also have the opportunity ("they may even thank you/for the first sexual experience") to cultivate the possibility of "darker fun" that blooms in the darkness of the cinema, including the possibility of "leaving/ and returning to an apartment near Paradise Mansion or Williamsburg Bridge with a lovely stranger before the end of the movie". Conversely, if mothers don't listen to the poem's advice, "The family breaks down /The child stands in front of the TV, his eyesight is reduced or even blind/ Watch the movies you don't let them watch when they are young."
"Love Notebook" (2004)
The Blessed Mary perfectly refutes the Puritanist idea of the pleasure of sin. The guilt in O'Hara's poems comes from denial and procrastination of pleasure. Kids will go to the movies anyway, and they'll find the fun they can find – how can they be presupposed that they'll be blind? But that excitement will eventually disappear, and the pleasant family fun that made it all possible will collapse. Without free access to anomalies/perversions – "candy bars" and "a free bag of popcorn" – children will never be normal.
O'Hara was a gay man, a New Yorker, an artist's companion, and a pioneer of the 1960s. That's when the old norms began to unravel, and what one of the Coen brothers' films called "new freedom" began to take over. But let's keep wandering the old times in the movies—the frank and dangerous times evoked in "Mary of All Blessings"—a little longer.
At least for Hollywood, heterosexual kisses may represent the full extent of humanity, but it also marks the seductive moment when the film's disguise becomes reality. Everyone knows that, in a way, everything on the screen is fake. The city streets are the set of the soundstage. Cowboys have stuntmen as stand-ins. Those bullets were empty. The monster that stomps on the car is only 18 inches tall. But the man and the woman were really kissing. They may hate each other, or they may hate each other's tone — or they may have slept with each other, or each other's spouse, or the director. But the kiss between them is a sure fact.
Love Before dawn (1995)
Therefore, the kiss in the movie can have countless explanations. Revisiting those famous kisses from classical Hollywood movies, you'll find yourself in the jungle of sexual semiotics. There is longing and hostility, defiance and pleading, patriarchal dominance and female advocacy. There are impossible limbal twists and suggestive elements, sometimes imposed by the anti-lust provisions of the Hayes Code, sometimes in order to inject stereotypes with the desire to breathe a new formal life.
You can find messy kisses, normal kisses, and all sorts of attempts to solve the problem of height difference and hand placement. Stroking hair, caressing cheeks, and interlocking fingers are like kisses themselves, suggesting and obscuring other things at the same time. Because while the other movements have not yet been shown, the kiss already has the same function as foreplay and rejection, evidence that the two will roll the sheets together, or symbolic compensation that they will not go to bed.
Roman Holiday (1953)
In other cultures with different rules and taboos, kisses can be implicit and delayed. In India, where kissing on screen was not accepted until recently, Bollywood song and dance films have developed a well-designed, often strongly sexual dance that includes passing by, wiping noses and singing up close and close, face-to-face.
Hollywood, on the other hand, is limited by its own. There's a passionate kiss between men and women in Wings, and this popular silent film about a World War I pilot won the first Academy Award for Best Picture in 1927.
Wings (1927)
Three years later, in Morocco, Marlene Dietrich, dressed in a tuxedo and top hat, kissed a woman while singing "Quand L'amour Meurt" to a nightclub audience, including Gary Cooper. But that was before the Hayes Code, and same-sex kissing disappeared until the 1970s.
Morocco (1930)
In 1957, the first interracial kissing appeared in Nikko Island, which sparked protests in the South and was denied screening. Interracial marriage is explicitly forbidden in the Hayes Code, and Hollywood has only recently begun to desensitize it.
Nikko Island (1957)
At the same time, the kiss also sacrifices its uniqueness and loses its glorious perversion. Other types of sex — those involving genitals — no longer need to be implied. They can be forged like anything else on the screen. Actors, whether completely naked or pseudo-naked, can pose in a manner that conforms to real action and can also make appropriate sounds with or without musical accompaniment.
Over the years, screen sex has undergone varying degrees of bluntness and stylization. Sometimes — in The Last Tango in Paris or The Life of Adele — it seems shocking, brave or important. Other times, it seems to be rigid and opportunistic. A lot of times, kisses aren't that fun, not even as sexy, just one item on the to-do list, like the exploding car in an action movie or the crazy rush to the airport at the end of a romantic comedy.
The Life of Adele (2013)
Kissing is still tempting when it comes down to clichés — in the rain, on the plane, on the boat, on the train. When two characters in the movie kiss, it means they stop talking, and the emotions between them need another form of communication. It's an inner strength, whether lip contact is an act of aggression—think Michael Corleone biting the lips of his betrayed second brother, Fredo, on New Year's Eve in Havana—a kind of fratricidal kiss about death or tenderness.
Or something else. One of the most amazing kisses I've seen on screen this year came from "Into the Wilderness," directed by Jean-Marc Varley and adapted from Cheryl Steder's autobiographical memoirs. In the film, we see Stredder, played by Reese Witherspoon, having a lot of casual sexual encounters, all during her marriage to her husband Paul. We had never seen the two of them in bed, and the only intimate physical contact occurred after they signed the divorce papers.
It's a goodbye kiss, warm and full, and in another film, it could mark the beginning rather than the end of a sexual relationship. To us, it looks like a first kiss, and because of that, it carries with it a bittersweet unfinished, never-ending romance. It also highlights the film's themes: loss, loneliness, intimacy, and self-reliance.
Into the Wilderness (2014)
You might argue that it's also the subject of Richard Linklater's seminal coming-of-age story, Boyhood, in which teenage Mason and his first love contribute a lovely kiss on screen. But the best kiss in that movie was one you couldn't see, and maybe not even happen at all.
In the final shot, Mason, who has just gone to college, sits and chats with a girl he just met. They ate a piece of marijuana brownie and hiked to Texas' Great Bend Ranch State Park, where they watched the sunset and secretly, shyly, glanced at each other from time to time, and that look could lead to... Well, you know.
Boyhood (2014)
Just when they seemed to have nothing to say, the camera perfectly gave a classic, bright two-person close-up, and then the screen gradually dimmed and the end credits began to roll. We don't know what will happen next. But we're pretty sure these fundamentals on screen apply.