"Something Good - Negro Kiss" is an intriguing piece from early cinema. Only recently rediscovered, it depicts a couple embracing for some smooching--a seemingly rare filmic example from the era of a positive portrayal of African Americans. It's also a remake, for which it wasn't as early or as rare even for the 19th century.
"The Kiss" (1896) was the Edison Company's most popular film in its day, so it's no surprise that it was remade (and not only with this film--Edison made another "The Kiss" in 1900, for instance). Indeed, remakes are essentially as old as film itself. The Lumière brothers remade Edison's first commercial film, "Blacksmith Scene" (1893), as "Les Forgerons" (1895), which was part of the program for their first public screening of the Cinématographe. Early Edison films themselves were sometimes remakes, as Deac Russell wrote in his essay, "Copycats: Anschütz Chronophotographs as Direct Source Material for Early Edison Kinetoscope Films." Moreover, Ottomar Anschütz began his serial photography by imitating the work of Eadweard Muybridge. And so on....
The popularity of "The Kiss" surely owes largely to its featuring two professional and credited actors from a play and with the film further being publicized with photographs in print media. It could be said, then, that "Negro Kiss" represents an acculturation of this dominate cinema culture, of white performers and audiences, to meld with an appeal with African-American actors and, perhaps, for African-American audiences. Like Edison's Kiss, that here is something of a comedic exaggeration. Doubly so according to film historian Charles Musser ("The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907"), who says the film "was simply labeled 'Burlesque on the John Rice and May Irwin Kiss.'" A burlesque upon a burlesque. The performers here, Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown, like director and producer William Selig, are said to have come from a background in minstrel shows. But, today, the funny thing is that the Rice-Irwin kiss comes across comedically, at best, as ridiculous, what with the mustache twirling and all. Suttle and Brown display a more joyful abandon and appear more natural as a result.
Another difference between the two pictures is the framing. For Rice and Irwin, the medium close-up position is more intimate, appropriate to their shoulder-to-shoulder affections. Meanwhile, with the slightly more-distanced camera here, the flimsy black backdrop is more conspicuous, but also Suttle and Brown incorporate more of their bodies with their rapport, as they hold and swing hands, move apart and back together, kissing thrice.
So much of the representation of African Americans scattered across what's available of the early (and, for the most part, general) history of cinema is based in stereotypes. Before I learned of this film, probably the earliest cinematic kiss involving a black character that I was aware of was "What Happened in the Tunnel" (1903), which was a joke rooted in the supposed unattractiveness of a maid, who was basically a mammy trope. (That 1903 Edison film, by the way, is yet another remake or reworking--in this case, of "The Kiss in the Tunnel" (1899, G.A. Smith), which itself is a continuation of that first screen peck in 1896.) More than anything, this is what makes "Negro Kiss" such a treat. It's why it was quickly added to the National Film Registry. After all, this was 17 years before D.W. Griffith's racist epic "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) helped cement atrocious, violent attitudes towards African Americans in Hollywood along with the film's other influences. It's worth celebrating that such old frames as "Negro Kiss" only rediscovered in the past couple years would offer an alternative and affirmative window into the history of the filmic representation of a racial minority. That is something good.
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