The Kiss in the Tunnel

1899
Silent
3m

The earliest film kiss held by the BFI National Archive is this stolen smooch aboard a steam train, an important example of Victorian film.

The earliest film kiss held by the BFI National Archive is this stolen smooch aboard a steam train, intended as a comic filler sequence to play as part of the ‘phantom ride' films popular in Victorian cinema. G. A. Smith's 1899 film shows a train going into a dark tunnel, revealing a couple in a railway carriage taking the opportunity to steal a kiss. As the train apparently emerges into the light the couple move apart in a guilty fashion, and although scarcely enough to make your Victorian grandmother blush, it gives the scene its slight frisson of naughtiness.

But Smith's Kiss in the Tunnel is also one of the world's most important early films because it is one of the first to edit together several related shots. Exhibitors were recommended that it be shown, to add humour, between a phantom ride of a train going into, then coming out of, a tunnel. The couple are played by George Albert Smith and his actress wife Laura Bayley, the railway film is Hepworth's View from an Engine Front - Train Leaving Tunnel (1899)

Inventing Film Language

As with any new technology, it was film’s early adopters whose innovations and discoveries began to map out what is possible.

The first filmmakers had a lot to learn, but they learnt quickly, driven by their own creative ambitions and by audiences' hunger for novelty. Most of the techniques we know today were in place by the end of the Victorian period.

It was the Victorian pioneers who developed the essential building blocks of film; close-ups, pans and travelling shots; editing and principles of continuity. And their ambition spurred them to innovate numerous tricks and effects, from jump-cuts, to double-exposure and even split screen. Generations of later filmmakers would refine these methods, but the groundwork had already been done.