The Kiss (1896) - Directed by William Heise for Thomas Edison.
May Irwin and John Rice create the very first on-screen kiss, from the New York stage comedy, “The Widow Jones”. They staged the kiss for the camera at the request of the New York World Newspaper. The resulting film was the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896. Naturally, the 47 second clip caused an uproar with one critic stating;
“The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.”
