The Kiss in the Tunnel

This is quite a sophisticated little feature for its time. Phantom rides, where a camera was fixed to the front of a train and then filmed the passing scenery as the track disappeared beneath it were extremely popular for a while in the late 19th century, and George Albert Smith, one of the Brighton School filmmakers, used this format to fashion a clever little film by inserting a shot between two phantom views of a train entering and leaving a tunnel of a couple (played by Smith and his wife) enjoying a couple of kisses. Metaphors - whether intended or otherwise - abound, and have done ever since, especially in the hands of Hitchcock. It no doubt proved quite saucy to a Victorian audience still conditioned to believe that displays of affection between husband and wife should be confined to the boudoir.

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.

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.

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.

Only a couple of years after the scary documentary 'Arrivee d'un train', and the cinema's gone all Freudian on us. The camera watches as a train emerges from a tunnel, towards which it then moves, placed as it is on the engine. This documentary shot cuts to a flagrantly artificial set, as a bourgeois couple sit among their many purchases, on their way home after a day's shopping.

In public (out shopping) and in private (at home) they must keep up a rigid, Victorian, bourgeois facade. In a train, though, in a dark tunnel, they are allowed brief liberty, as the husband kisses a protesting, though not unwilling wife, before propriety returns with the tunnelless daylight. This film is given extra frisson by the knowledge that the couple are played by the director and his wife.

This kind of equation of trains with sex would become a cliche, most wittily used by Hitchcock in films like 'The 39 Steps', 'The Lady Vanishes' and 'North by Northwest'. Where this film scores is in its paradoxical awareness - the natural desires of a married couple find expression in an 'artificial' setting, which expresses a truer reality; while the repressive, artificial world of codes, strictures and taboos are equated with the 'natural', when, of course, they are anything but.

The film also links the train, the cinema and sex, the idea of being in the dark and letting your fantasies take off away from society; the difference between public and private blurred by new technologies.