Art, Cinema, Sex, Ontology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the In-visible of Cinema

Abstract

In 1899 the English filmmaker George Albert Smith produced a film called The Kiss in the Tunnel. Smith’s film began with a shot of a train entering a tunnel, cut to a couple in a private carriage stealing a kiss and then returned to a shot of the train leaving the tunnel. Although silent, monochrome and only 67 seconds long, this three-shot film anticipates aspects of the dominant modes and techniques of filmmaking (narrative, editing, action continuity) that are with us today. Similarly, the film’s combination of the actual and the fictional raises a number of profound questions about the nature of cinema which still resonate. Smith’s film already sketches out the medium specificity of films and provides us with many of the fundamental elements of the cinematic experience. Despite the silence and the brevity Smith’s film is still just that: a fully formed film. Nothing is waiting to be produced that will prevent us calling our experience of The Kiss in the Tunnel a cinematic one.¹