First ever screen kiss sparked outcry for censorship after being labelled ‘obscene’

The whole video is only around 18 seconds long, but the first screen kiss caused outrage when it was released in April 1896.

The Kiss starred May Irwin (Canada) as Widow Jones and John C. Rice (USA) as Billie Bikes, who re-enacted a kiss they shared in stage musical The Widow Jones.

But although they’d shared this kiss on stage many times, a lot of people simply weren’t ready to see something like this on film.

The short black and white film was directed by William Heise for Edison Studios, owned by inventor Thomas Edison, at their Black Maria studio (the first film studio) in West Orange, New Jersey, USA.

A description in the Edison film catalogue reads: “They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time.”

It’s now hailed for it’s cultural significance, with the United States Library of Congress selecting it for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1999.

When it was first released, it was publicly denounced as shocking and obscene.

In response, the Roman Catholic Church called for censorship and moral reform as kissing in public was still thought of as very taboo by many Victorian people.

One critic at the time is reported to have said: “The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.”

And it’s said that many newspaper editorials at the time called for police action in places where the film was being shown.

The film’s controversy didn’t affect the popularity of Heise, who went on to add hundreds of credits to his name.

It wasn’t the first record-breaking film created by Edison either.

A year earlier in 1895, Edison Laboratories created the first shot using special effects, a silent minute-long film called Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

It used stop-action to give the impression of beheading, and it was so convincing at the time that some viewers actually believed the actress had given her life for the film.

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