Andy Warhol | Kiss / 1963-1964

some like it hot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andy Warhol (director) Kiss / 1963-1964 [58 minutes]

 

One of the several Warhol films that are perhaps more talked about than actually seen, Kiss was shot from 1963-1964 as 13 silent close-ups on a 16mm Bolex camera roll, run at lower than usual speed. The film ran out at from 3 to 6 minutes, so Warhol used basically a constructivist method to record his black and white kissing sessions between unnamed couples including Naomi Levine, Gerard Malanga, Rufus Collins, Johnny Dodd, Mark Lancaster, Ed Sanders, Fred Herko, Baby Jane Hozer, Marisol, Barbara Rudin, Robert Indiana, Charlotte Gilbertson, Philip von Rensselaet, Paul Restany, and possibly others. Eventually, the 13 short films were linked to include one longer 58-minute work, with a white blank screen between each kissing event.

    Some commentators such as the Village Voice’s Bob Colacello argue that the impetus of the project was to satirize or perhaps even “break” the Hollywood Production Code, which stipulated that kisses, between heterosexual couples only of course, should last no more that 3 seconds. If this is true, Warhol went even further by including same-sex couples and in one case a mixed racial kissing pair.

     But, in fact, one wonders watching the film en masse whether most couples spend 3-6 minutes actually kissing before moving on to further sexual actions. Indeed, quite early in the series, the two males Mark Lancaster and Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga seem to have a somewhat difficult time of remaining lock-lipped as Malanga’s hands move naturally elsewhere before returning to the required focus on the kiss.

     And given the numerous works of the Screen Tests project, we can perceive this early series as a way to simply get to know, quite voyeuristically, several of the friends who surrounded Warhol in at the Factory. Critic Ruairí McCann goes even further by suggesting that this “film” marks an early interest in narrative:

 

“Unlike the conceptual behemoths that would follow soon after, such as Sleep and Empire (both 1964), Kiss and its hive of romances, along with the first salvos of his Screen Tests project, would mark the start of a steady trickle of narrative and character, filtering through what Annette Michelson called a “cinema of literal textuality”. The culmination of this change, which included the employment of sound and more dynamic editing and camera movement, being that deluge of personality and chatter; the 210 minute (approximately), split-screen Chelsea Girls (1966).”

    Most of the series consist of static close-ups of the subjects’ faces, with little interpolation of location, be it a bed, a couch, or simply mid-air. Yet as McCann points out, there are exceptions, “with the occasional bit of shadow play produced by their love throes turning holographic against glaring spotlights.” And at other moments “the camera does move and a look at the setting or the surrounding props is parceled out. For instance, midway through couple number 4, Warhol zooms out to reveal a couch and a few hanging paintings, indicating that we are more than likely in some stratum of his Silver Factory,” although others have pointed out that several of the kissing sessions were done in Naomi Levine’s apartment, and she plays an outsized role in the sequence, kissing The Fugs member Ed Sanders, the black actor Rufus Collins, and Malanga.

     Moreover, continues McCann, “the lighting during couple number 5’s kiss is particularly high-contrast. Solid bands of silhouette wrap themselves around the pair, giving the impression of a back-alley dalliance. While with couple number 8, in which a woman is being ravished while draped across a leopard skinned settee, springs to mind a clandestine, drawing room consummation of some upper crust affair.”

    And as this critic argues, the film has already a tradition in cinema. Its lineage stretches as far back as the medium’s afterbirth, “with the William Heise shot Thomas Edison produced The Kiss (1896),”—to say nothing of the first on-screen kiss between two women, filmed by Eadweard Muybridge in 1887.

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).