The Kiss in the Tunnel

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.

A man and a woman exchange a kiss in the tunnel. After they read again. Smith is a filmaker of the school of Brighton and is among the first to use the alternate editing , that takes up different angles of the same location. One of the first kisses in the history of cinema is very fleeting and passenger.

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.

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.

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.