Kiss est une serie de 13 court metrages de Andy Warhol. Pas un texte pour une fois, juste une superbe longue video de 58 minutes de baisers

Kiss consists of a series of short, silent, black and white films in which 13 couples kiss each other. Andy Warhol took more than one year to shoot the film, between August 1963 and the end of 1964, in several different locations.
Kiss signs the start of some long term relationships between Warhol and some of the members of the cast. Such is the case of Naomi Levine (Warhol’s “first female superstar”) or Gerard Malanga (who became the artist’s manager during the second half of the 1960’s); others include the art critic Pierre Restany, Ed Sanders (lead singer of the Fugs), Rufus Collins (a member of the experimental group of the Living Theatre), the Venezuelan artist Marisol and the American painter Charlotte Gilbertson.
Several segments of Warhol’s Kiss film(s) were shot in Naomi Levine’s apartment. In fact, the first Kiss scenes (that included Naomi kissing Ed Sanders, Rufus Collins and Gerard Malanga ) were originally known as the ‘Andy Warhol Serial’ and were first shown at the Grammercy Arts Theater in September 1963.
According to the Village Voice’s critic Bob Colacello, the idea for Kiss came as a reaction to The Production Code (an American regulation, in force from 1930 to 1967, that enumerated the decent general principles for movies), which stated that films could not show actors kissing for more than 3 seconds.
Independently of its history, Kiss is a fantastic example of Warhol’s early movies, in which he uses his 16mm Bolex camera to create films that explore length and stillness, though a hard process of editing all the short movies.
At the same time, its minimalist and conceptual depicting of the romantic and deep act of kissing creates a work that gives us a constant tension between a cold perception of the couple’s act of kissing and an unavoidable feeling of involvement.

Cast:
(first part): Naomi Levine & Ed Sanders; Naomi Levine & Rufus Collins; Naomi Levine & Gerard Malanga; (second part) Baby Jane Holzer & John Palmer; Baby Jane Holzer & Gerard Malanga; John Palmer & Andrew Meyer; Freddy Herko, Johnny Dodd, Charlotte Gilbertson, Philip von Rensselaet, Pierre Restany, Marisol;B&N;
USA, 1963, 58