Kiss kiss, click click

1896. Edison Studios debuts The Kiss: 18 slow, syrupy seconds of stage-lit mouth-to-mouth between May Irwin and John Rice. The Church calls for cuts, moralists hiss “beastly,” ticket lines only grow. The scandal hardens into legend: cinema’s first kiss.

Except it wasn’t.

Years earlier, sometime in the 1880s, Eadweard Muybridge was busy breaking time into frames. His motion studies were the building blocks of cinema. Just a sequence of stills turning into motion: horse gallops, men jumping, women climbing stairs. Then comes the forbidden splice: two unclothed women, handshake turning to a silent kiss. Just raw chemistry held hostage in a filing cabinet labeled motion study before the world had the language to say what it was seeing.

Who were they? The archives don’t say. Likely models or performers hired for Muybridge’s photographic experiments. Their names weren’t recorded nor was their kiss given a title. No one called it art. It was archived without commentary, invisible because society couldn’t deal with it.

Edison’s hetero lip-lock fit the fable, so it made the headlines. Muybridge’s homo-duet fried the circuitry; it had to be smothered under silence.

This was a silence enforced by the same systems that decide what’s visible, what’s remembered, what counts. Those same systems still exist today.

Desire made safe earns applause; desire that rattles the cage gets quarantined.

And so, cinema’s real first kiss was ghosted by history.

Yet even in the dark, those outlaw images keep breathing. Proof that the fiercest sparks burn long after the theater lights go cold.

Written by Amer Chamaa