The Kiss in the Tunnel

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.

Not unlike my feeling when I saw Lumiere shoot form a leaving train, I was taken by the smooth movement into the tunnel that the film opens with and likewise the exit at the end. I liked it technically but also as a story telling device because it tells the viewer that the middle part of the story in the carriage is occurring in this tunnel. Essentially it has put the viewer on the train. It is an effective narrative tool but you need to remember that at this time there were no set narrative devices like we have now. The conventions of cinematic story telling are so set that we now only notice them when they are shunned. So here this is interesting to watch in regards seeing this early device used.

However the middle section is not as good. A simple static shot that has a man kiss a woman on the cheek with a lot of fuss leading up to it. It is not funny or interesting and seems out of place with the technical strength at the start. Worth a look to appreciate the narrative device but not much more than that.

This G.A. Smith film has a lively feel to it, and it also features some clever and imaginative technique. The subject is simple enough, but Smith demonstrates some creative ideas that would have been creditable even in a film-maker of a later generation.

The actual "Kiss in the Tunnel" is the middle part of the movie, and it is preceded by a creative shot from the front of a train as it enters a tunnel, making the audience feel as if they were the ones entering the tunnel. It works quite well, and because Bamforth and Company soon afterwards released a remake with a different opening, you can compare the two to see how well Smith's idea works. It often happens that the implied can be more effective than the overt, and this is one example.

The footage with Smith and his wife is quite lively, and Mrs. Smith seems to have taken particularly well to being on screen. This is not the only feature of Smith's that she added some energy to (another particularly good performance being in "Mary Jane's Mishap"). This one also has something of a gentle, impish suggestiveness that Alfred Hitchcock would have been happy with. All in all, this is a nicely made little feature.

I'm going to be fair with both versions of this comedic subject: I liked the Phantom Ride in this film better, but the kiss in the Bamforth film (see my review for that film) is more romantic. However, BOTH are extremely important in the history of cinema because in 1899 most films were only one shot long--and this film has three: the train going in the tunnel, the kiss, and the train coming out. Yes, the plot is really weak, but it's actually well above average for 1899.

G. A. Smith would later become even more important for his uses of closeups and cutting, but even by 1899 he was already getting pretty innovative, as evidenced by this movie. Both versions of this 'comedy' are worth looking at simply for comparison, but for modern audiences today there's nothing especially great to see in either one.

A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899)

The camera is stationed on a railroad track outside a tunnel. The camera then begins to move in the camera when we get an edit to a man and woman on the train kissing. We then get another edit as the camera is now moving out of the tunnel.

A KISS IN THE TUNNEL proved to be so popular that another film with the same title and the same subject was released the very same year. Talk about a fast remake! Actually, this here was quite common back in the day. This short is actually rather creative with the way it uses editing to somewhat tell a story. The use of coming into the tunnel, having the kissing and then going out of the tunnel was certainly creative for its day and makes this a rather important picture for early cinema.

In the beginning of film history, producers didn't control the final appearance of their films as they do today. This was when exhibitors purchased films rather than renting them and when films consisted of a single shot-scene. Soon, producers made multiple one-shot films with a shared theme, but exhibitors could still choose which shots they purchased and how to assemble them into programs. Finally, producers created multi-shot films with complex narratives, placed their own title cards within them, and distributors sold (and, later, rented) these films only as a whole. This film, George Albert Smith's "The Kiss in the Tunnel", is one of the more important and interesting films in this transition.

The British Film Institute (BFI) print that we have today is a three-shot film. The first and last shots are from a phantom ride film by Cecil Hepworth, which had the appropriate title "View from Engine Front - Train Leaving Tunnel" (1899). Phantom rides were an early and popular genre of films. They were a point-of-view (POV) shot from the "perspective" of a moving train. The cameraman would mount the camera to the locomotive and point the camera forward. These films provided a constantly shifted framing of scenery and, thus, were some of the earliest to feature moving camera shots. Reportedly, the phantom ride genre began with the American Mutoscope Company's "The Haverstraw Tunnel" (1897). Additionally, the Lumière Company had largely introduced the moving camera shot by placing the camera on a moving object, like a train or boat, such as in, perhaps the first such film, "Panorama du Grand Canal vu d'un bateau" (1896).

Smith made the insert shot, which is supposed to be set in the interior of a railway carriage. Smith specifically made this film, and it was advertised as such, to be edited into a phantom ride film as the train passed through a tunnel--as is the case in the BFI copy. At this time, Hepworth films and Smith films were both distributed by the Warwick Trading Company, which may help explain the marriage of these two films in the BFI print. This arrangement would serve as quite a surprising and comedic experience to viewers accustomed to such one shot, non-fiction, and non-narrative phantom rides, as the 40-foot long scene by Smith shows the director himself and his actress-wife kissing under the privacy of the tunnel's darkness.

The interior scene is primitive in its mise-en-scène; the painted set by Smith's assistant (and often times, actor) Tom Green, including the black-colored windows, is cheap, and the shadows of the actors make it evident that Smith filmed this at an open-air set. Yet, as Frank Gray has pointed out in his essay "The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), G.A. Smith and the Emergence of the Edited Film in England", this film was pivotal in the transition from single-shot films to multi-shot ones and more elaborate narratives, as well as in the transition of editorial control away from exhibitors and to producers. Moreover, the film demonstrates how shots filmed at different locations and at different times may be edited together to appear spatially and temporally continuous and how the juxtaposition of two separate continuous actions cohesively forms a narrative. This was a groundbreaking expansion of film grammar at the time.

Smith would continue to introduce further innovations in scene dissection and continuity editing in his subsequent productions. His films and those by other early British filmmakers had an immense influence on the work of others--perhaps most importantly on Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Company in America and Ferdinand Zecca for the Pathé Company in France. Porter and Zecca both remade this particular film. One innovation of these two remakes is that they use matte shots for passing scenery through the compartment's window. Zecca's film "Flirt en chemin de fer" (1901) is otherwise (according to Charles Musser and Tom Gunning, who I'll trust since I haven't seen it) a straightforward remake of Smith's film. Porter's film "What Happened in the Tunnel" (1903), however, includes a racist joke involving the switching of seats between a young woman with her mammy as the suitor attempts to kiss the young woman in the darkness of the tunnel. In Lubin's remake "Love in a Railroad Train" (1902), his joke addition involved the kissing of the bottom of the woman's baby. Riley and Bamforth Films also remade Smith's film with the same title and within the same year. That remake, however, wasn't to be part of a phantom ride. Its bookend shots are stationary, objective perspectives unattached to the train and are of the train entering and exiting the tunnel. In addition to the more low-key acting in it, it doesn't seem to serve the same humorous purpose. The interior set is better, though.