Commentary: Something Out of Nothing—Making Traffic in Kisses

Abstract

Commentary:Something Out of Nothing—Making Traffic in Kisses Kiki Loveday and Susan Potter Video: Traffic in Kisses This video is available at https://youtu.be/cJ0G40YZwPs. And then I had a sudden image: a dog lying somewhere very still, and a child, first looking at it, and then, compulsively, nudging it. Why? to see whether it was alive; because if it moves, if it can move, it lives. This most primitive, this most instinctive of all gestures: to make it move to make it live. So I had always been doing with my camera … —Maya Deren, Letter to James Card, April 19, 1955 Making Things Move We were curious about what would happen. In early cinema there is a genre known as the kiss film or kissing films, and the genre's emergence indicates already that certain shared expectations are forming about what might happen. Typically two figures, conventionally legible as a man and a woman, are framed in a medium shot (Figure 1). They may interact on screen, appear to talk to each other, perhaps court one another, before kissing, either once or several times in less than a minute of screen time. A popular attraction of early cinema, kiss films are historically important because they point to early film's intermediality, the traffic in entertainers and entertainments between stage and screen.1 More significantly, for our purposes, as a genre they are evidence of the intensification of the modern regime of sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century.2 Kiss films are regarded by Linda Williams as "the screen's first sex act," standing in for the "whole of sex that can be seen" while "permanently poised on the brink [End Page 37] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Still, The New Kiss (Edison, US, 1900), remediated in Traffic in Kisses (Love-day and Potter, 2022). of carnal knowledge."3 Kiss films also instantiate early cinema's sexualization of public space, a process entangled with early cinema's forensic gaze of the body (Figure 2).4 We were curious about what would happen if we worked together on a creative assemblage of kiss films, if we attempted to model a lesbian audiovisual and historiographical practice while offering a queer perspective on the aesthetic, social, and disciplinary functions of kiss films in the history of early cinema. Produced across several weeks by exchanging, responding to, and assembling a series of image and sound sequences, Traffic in Kisses remediates some of the most iconic kiss films produced between 1896 and 1905. Drawing inspiration from queer collage films such as The Meeting of Two Queens (Cecilia Barriga, US, 1991), Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer, US, 1992), Badass Supermama (Etang Inyang, 1996), and Grosse Fuge (William Comstock, US, 1998), the resulting video tests out some ideas about the circulation and emergence of erotic and sexual discourses in early cinema, and the mobilization of—and resistance to—a filmic gaze articulated to concepts and categories such as the homoerotic, the Sapphic, lesbian, or, in some cases, trans*.5 In keeping with the [End Page 38] exquisite paradigm, we have not revised the video. It exists as an artifact of our research process and collaboration. Our scholarly work differently addresses the relation between cinema as popular medium and the representation of sexuality. Susan's work has investigated early cinema's participation in the consolidation of sexuality as a modern regime of power. She has argued that sexually legible figures in silent cinema are only the belated and most visible signs of an expansive array of knowledges, practices, aesthetic forms, and genres.6 In relation to the unruly period of early cinema, she has argued that certain kinds of homoerotic and Sapphic visual pleasures persist even as emergent genres such as the kiss films and other experiments in mise-en-scène and editing can be understood as fugitive signs of the emergence of new models of sexual identity. Kiki's work, in contrast, assumes a post-queer perspective to historicize the dual meanings of lesbian that circulated at the turn of the twentieth century: of sexual "deviancy," and of femxle authorial genius. She considers how scholarly discourses and canons produce...