Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Movies Edison & Warhol Just Want Your Extra Time and Your...
Posted by Gabe Wardell on Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 9:08 AM
Long before three-time reigning award-winners Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson cornered the market on the the MTV Movie Awards for Best Kiss, audiences were enthralled with cinematic smooches.
In fact, the phenomenon goes all the way back to the birth of the medium itself. There's a terrific sequence in Martin Scorsese's Hugo that encapsulates the early history of cinema. One of the featured shorts is The Kiss, from Thomas Edison's Black Maria Studio.
On its face, this silent thirty-second film is a delightful medium shot of a mustachioed man and a zaftig woman chatting, then smooching. According to the Library of Congress, the film is "the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896." In context, The Kiss is actually a climactic scene from the stage comedy "The Widow Jones" starring May Irwin and John Rice. Though it works as an abstraction—an on-screen kiss—it is in fact an embryonic narrative film.
Kiss (1963), Andy Warhol's first film to screen publicly is a direct comment on the Edison Vitascope. Stripped of all narrative pretense, Warhol's Kiss announces a cinematic re-birth of sorts. It treads a line between between documenting kisses and staging them for the camera; between abstraction and realism; between chastity and licentiousness.
The hypnotic, mesmerizing quality of Warhol's 16mm film, complete with light flares at each reel change, is lost on video.
See it live on film, with only the purr of the projector as your soundtrack, this Friday, December 9 at 8 PM at the Contemporary.
Tickets are $5 ($3 for ACAC members).
Info here:
http://thecontemporary.org/programming/2011-fall-programming/film-screening-andy-warhol/
and here:
http://www.frequentsmallmeals.com/Warhol08.htm
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