THE KISS

Standard 16mm Film & Installation

The Kiss is an exploration of the nature of the clichéd cinematic kiss sequence and the way in which the audience are affected by these sublime images. The film installation focuses on Alfred Hitchcock’s notion of the temporary ménage a trois - the theory that through the presence of a camera, the audience are drawn into these sublime images; forcing them to become a part of the cinematic experience. The audience are forced to become a part of the cinematic experience, given, as Hitchcock stated, ‘the great privilege of embracing’ the couple. As Film Critic Pascal Bowiter suggests in his essay Hitchcockian Suspense, ‘a couple implies a third’ and ‘[t]here is thus always a third party in a couple, a gaze welding it together.’ Through the presence of the camera (representing the audience) we become a third party to the lovers embrace, thereby creating Hitchcock’s ‘temporary ménage à trois’.

The film was originally installed within a small pseudo cinema projection booth and the audience were restricted to watching the film via the reflected, slightly out of focus light spillage from the projector, creating an inversion of the cinematic experience. This forced the audience to both inhabit and take on the perspective of the Projectionist instead of the spellbound spectator. Free to move around the entire projection booth, they inadvertently walk through and disrupt the refracted film image, revealing its true form – merely ephemeral light.