In 1896, Thomas Edi­son pro­duced The Kiss. One of the first films ever com­mer­cial­ly screened, it adapts the then-pop­u­lar musi­cal The Wid­ow Jones — or at least it adapts about twen­ty sec­onds of it, a kiss that hap­pens in the very last scene. Two years lat­er came the equal­ly short but dif­fer­ent­ly ground­break­ing Some­thing Good – Negro Kiss, a ver­sion of The Kiss star­ring black actors instead of white ones. Only now, thanks in part to the efforts of Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia archivist Dino Everett and Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Cin­e­ma and Media Stud­ies pro­fes­sor Allyson Nadia Field, has it received prop­er recog­ni­tion as the first such kiss on film.

“To uncov­er the ori­gins of Everett’s footage, Field relied on inven­to­ry and dis­tri­b­u­tion cat­a­logs, trac­ing the film to Chica­go,” writes UChica­go News’ Jack Wang. “This was where William Selig —a  vaude­ville per­former turned film pro­duc­er — had shot it on his knock­off of a Lumière Ciné­matographe. That cam­era pro­duced the tell­tale per­fo­ra­tion marks which had tipped Everett off to the print’s age.”

With sup­port from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Jas­mine Weber, “Field not only iden­ti­fied the film­mak­er, but the per­form­ers: Saint Sut­tle and Ger­tie Brown. Sut­tle is dressed in a dap­per suit and bowtie, while Brown dons an ornate dress — cos­tumes that Field says were typ­i­cal of min­strel per­form­ers.”

“What makes this film so remark­able is that if you look at films from this peri­od that fea­ture African-Amer­i­cans, first of all, most of them are white actors in black­face,” says Field in the NPR seg­ment above. “They are car­i­ca­tures. They’re cer­tain­ly racist. They fea­ture racist tropes like water­mel­on-eat­ing con­tests and things like that. The Amer­i­can screen was incred­i­bly hos­tile to African-Amer­i­cans for much of its his­to­ry,” but Some­thing Good — Negro Kiss “refutes those kind of car­i­ca­tures and asserts an image of human­i­ty and of love.”

That image has received quite a response on the inter­net as the clip has cir­cu­lat­ed in the week since its induc­tion into the Library of Con­gress’ Nation­al Film Reg­istry along­side the likes of The Shin­ing, Mon­terey Pop, Broke­back Moun­tain, The Lady from Shang­hai, and Juras­sic Park. One lawyer-slash-crit­ic even brought this piece of ear­ly cin­e­ma togeth­er with a piece of cur­rent cin­e­ma, mash­ing it up with the score of Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ just-released James Bald­win adap­ta­tion If Beale Street Could Talk. Selig, Sut­tle, and Brown must have known full well that they were mak­ing some­thing new. But did they know they were also mak­ing his­to­ry?

via Quartz

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle (A Free Course from Stan­ford)

Mas­sive New Data­base Will Final­ly Allow Us to Iden­ti­fy Enslaved Peo­ples and Their Descen­dants in the Amer­i­c­as

Down­load Dig­i­tized Copies of The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civ­il Rights Guide to Trav­el­ing Safe­ly in the U.S. (1936–66)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Pio­neer­ing film­mak­ers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the inven­tors of the pro­ject­ed motion pic­ture, held their first pri­vate screen­ing in Paris in March of 1895. The streets of the French cap­i­tal would go on to pro­vide the broth­ers with plen­ty of life in motion for their new tech­nol­o­gy to cap­ture in the years there­after, and you can watch eight such real scenes com­piled in the video above. With its star­tling clar­i­ty — and its more recent­ly cor­rect­ed motion and added sound — this selec­tion of pieces of Lumière footage offers a rich six-minute cin­e­mat­ic time-trav­el expe­ri­ence to the City of Light between the years of 1896 and 1900.

Guy Jones, the uploader of the video on Youtube, pro­vides the fol­low­ing guide to the loca­tions:

Notre-Dame Cathe­dral (1896)

Alma Bridge (1900)

Avenue des Champs-Élysées (1899)

Place de la Con­corde (1897)

Pass­ing of a fire brigade (1897)

Tui­leries Gar­den (1896)

Mov­ing walk­way at the Paris Expo­si­tion (1900)

The Eif­fel Tow­er from the Rives de la Seine à Paris (1897)

These places have con­tin­ued to pro­vide gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers with loca­tions for their urban cin­e­mat­ic visions. (The Eif­fel Tow­er now pro­vides an imme­di­ate visu­al short­hand for the city, though it cer­tain­ly would­n’t have in this Lumière footage, when it was less than ten years old.) That goes for French film­mak­ers as well as those of many oth­er nation­al­i­ties: even the Coen Broth­ers used Tui­leries Gar­den for their short film Tui­leries, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

Or at least they used the sub­way sta­tion under­neath Tui­leries Gar­den, which would­n’t open until 1900, the same year as the Paris Métro itself — and the year of the Paris Expo­si­tion, also known as the Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle, which gave Parisians the chance to ride the mov­ing side­walk seen in the sec­ond-to-last Lumière seg­ment.

Any­one famil­iar with the Paris of the 21st cen­tu­ry will be quick to observe the dif­fer­ences between the city now and the city 120 years ago. But a Parisian of the 1890s might well have said they were the ones who lived in a city made unrec­og­niz­able to ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions, giv­en Georges-Eugène Hauss­man­n’s com­plete revi­sion of the cen­tral city com­mis­sioned by Napoléon III and car­ried out between 1853 and 1870. For good or for ill, it’s just as much Hauss­man­n’s Paris today as it was Hauss­man­n’s Paris in the 1890s, and crit­i­cisms that the city has remained frozen in time aren’t with­out mer­it. But to see what has most dra­mat­i­cal­ly changed about mod­ern Paris — that is, what has changed about how peo­ple see and inter­act with mod­ern Paris — we must turn to cin­e­ma. Might I sug­gest the work of Éric Rohmer?

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Dra­mat­ic Footage of San Fran­cis­co Right Before & After the Mas­sive­ly Dev­as­tat­ing Earth­quake of 1906

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.