Kiss (1963 54min bw 16MM)
Andy
Warhol’s Kiss is probably the artist’s earliest film work that was
screened in public. Harkening back to the time when Hayes Office censors
would not allow lips to touch and linger for more than three seconds in
Hollywood films, with Kiss, Warhol decided to shoot male/female,
female/female and male/male snogs that went on for three minutes. The
concept was likely also influenced by a 1929 Greta Garbo film called The
Kiss which apparently was screened at Amos Vogel’s influential Cinema
16 experimental film society right around the time that Warhol bought
his first Bolex film camera.The Kiss films were started in 1963 and
shown in installments during weekly underground film screenings
organized by Jonas Mekas. Eventually a 55-minute long version of Kiss
was assembled. Among the participants were Ed Sanders of The Fugs, actor
Rufus Collins from the Living Theatre, sculptor Marisol, artist Robert
Indiana, as well as several of the outcasts and doomed beauties who
would come to comprise the Factory’s “superstars.” The woman who you see
kissing several guys, is Naomi Levine, who probably also came up with
the concept (many of the kisses were also shot in her apartment). Andy
Warhol referred to Levine as “my first female superstar.” Dangerousminds
(1930 55min bw / digital projection)
“Poets . . . shed not only the red blood of their hearts but the white blood of their souls,” proclaimed Jean Cocteau of his groundbreaking first film—an exploration of the plight of the artist, the power of metaphor and the relationship between art and dreams. One of cinema’s great experiments, this first installment of the Orphic Trilogy stretches the medium to its limits in an effort to capture the poet’s obsession with the struggle between the forces of life and death." Criterion
