EDISON Giphoscope Collection | The Kiss (1900)

'A subsequent Edison short, filmed four years later — and perfectly at home, like so much of the earliest cinema, on YouTube — displays a similar visual and performative dynamic. The couple, younger and friskier than the first, alternate between cheek-to-cheek and mouth-to-mouth canoodling, and also between self-consciousness and fascination. The man winks at the camera and shoots his eyebrows up and down. His smiling lady friend looks off to the side and upward, as if to avoid the camera’s gaze. The kisses grow more frequent and the cuddles more energetic, leading the viewer, then and now, to wonder what might happen next and to raise, perhaps not for the first time and certainly not for the last, the tantalizing — and to some, worrying — possibility that the public might look at movies and get ideas' (from A Brief History Of Kissing In Movies, nytimesheadline)

Giphoscope n° 84 | Puro Model, cherrywood base painted black, black velvet details.

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10th Avenue at Quebec looking east, 1900

The girl in the foreground is Florence Steele.

Source: City of Vancouver Archives #Str P273

Elgin Street, with with City Hall and Knox Church, Ottawa

ca.1900

Source: Toronto Public Library