The kiss between May Irwin and John Rice only lasted about two seconds, but it created an international sensation. It was the first time anyone had filmed a kiss, let alone shown it to the public, and moviegoers couldn’t get enough. Audiences crowded vaudeville theaters and music halls to see the two actors embrace on film “in a way that [brought] down the house every time,” according to a Thomas Edison, Inc. catalog.
The filmmakers behind The Kiss hadn’t put much thought into their cinematic display of affection. It was little more than a publicity stunt, which borrowed from a preexisting scene in Irwin and Rice’s successful musical comedy on Broadway. But this short film marked a thrilling shift in what movies could do, and what audiences could expect from the fledgling new medium.
The Kiss arrived in 1896, when movies were still a captivating new concept. Auguste and Louis Lumiere had just begun showing off their cinematograph—a hand-crank camera that included a projector—in demonstrations around Paris, three years after Thomas Edison had invited spectators to peer into the peephole of his kinetoscope and watch the flickering film inside. The technology was developing every day, and so were the stories. As creative pioneers like Georges Melies entered the scene, moviegoers could expect to see a lot more than simple figures in motion. New shorts debuted promising scenes of shaving, sneezing, and speeding trains. One thing that was conspicuously lacking, however, was romance.
Edison fixed that problem soon enough. The inventor had been making films out of the “Black Maria”—his production studio in West Orange, New Jersey, so named after the slang term for a police wagon—since 1893, but in 1896, he shot something a little different. That spring, he brought the two stars of The Widow Jones out to his studio to film the kiss from act one of their hit show. In the play and subsequent short film, May Irwin and John Rice begin their love scene with their cheeks pressed closely together, as they whisper out of the sides of their mouths. The comedy continues until the couple finally breaks the silly pose, smiles, and then shares a chaste peck on the lips. Edison’s short ran roughly 20 seconds, and would premiere later that year.
As UC Berkeley film professor Linda Williams writes, The Kiss immediately became “the most popular of the many shorts being shown” when it debuted. Audiences found it fresh and funny, and the media breathlessly fed into the hype. In a New York World article titled “Anatomy of a Kiss,” the newspaper reported, “For the first time in the history of the world it is possible to see what a kiss looks like… In the forty-two feet of kiss recorded by the kinetoscope every phase is shown with startling distinctness… The real kiss is a revelation. The idea of the kinetoscopic kiss has unlimited possibilities.