The Kiss in the Tunnel

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.

A cheeky little short but also highlights film techniques that we now taken for granted.

The train enters the tunnel but we see this from our point of view shot and as we head down the tunnel we see the train going the other direction.

Once the train enters the tunnel we switch from the exterior location to the carriage scene that has been filmed in the studio.

Here we see a man and woman, presumably married. The man is smoking and as the train enters the tunnel he makes a daring move to kiss the woman.

A simplistic film and presumably seen as risqué at the time and no doubt based on a lantern slide show.

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.

You see a train exiting the tunnel, and then you see - from the train's perspective - another train entering the tunnel from the opposite direction. Then the view switches to inside the train where a couple exchange a few kisses. This was actually shot in a studio. Finally, you are seeing things from the train's perspective again as the train exits the tunnel.

The copy I saw was very clear, almost appearing to be a film made today and altered to look like it was made in 1899. But of course it is clear. All the information is there in a 35 mm print (16 mm came much later). The image is uncompressed, a resolution equivalent of probably 6K. 35mm was used from the beginning, and it became standard around 1905. Bad resolution on youtube is usually because of the up-loader. A bad VHS-print in 480p is still a bad VHS print. You can't improve the image by using a higher resolution, the information is gone forever. You can rely on BFI to use the best methods.

The couple kissing was played by director G. A. Smith and his wife. Smith made a different version of this same film later in 1899.

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.