“The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of cannon but its echo lasts a great deal longer.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The filmmaker, Tatia Pilieva, just released a short film that’s as spectacular to watch as butterfly wings. It’s equally delicate and beautiful, and just as likely to leave you grinning. It’s super-short, it’s like, three minutes and some change. The film brings together twenty strangers and asks them to kiss for the first time … as they’re recorded on camera.
First Kiss is possibly one of the coolest things you’ll watch this year.
You can trust it’s got its bona fides, as far as romance goes. My girl, the French singer/actress/model/badass, SoKo, is one of the strangers asked to kiss on camera. And one of her coolest, most tender-hearted songs, “We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow” provides the film’s soundtrack. As you watch Pilieva’s work it feels like you’re eating dessert in the middle of a dream.
First Kiss is vaguely reminiscent of two other recent art projects centered on what’s revealed when an artist pushes strangers into moments of intimacy, and how our invisible walls fall away when we touch each other.
The photographer Richard Renaldi created a series of photos called, Touching Strangers, in 2007. He asked complete strangers to pose as if they were close friends or lovers. Their body language often looks as natural as if they were truly intimate, which raises so many cool questions for the viewer to consider.
A few years later, in 2011, the photographer, Jamie Diamond, began a series called Constructed Family Portraits. In his series, he arranged to meet strangers in hotel rooms, where he’d pose them together to capture a “picture perfect” holiday card, one that absolutely no family would take. His series was more humorous but also revealed how touch can signal so much to both the viewer and the subject.
What gives Tatia Pilieva’s piece slightly more of a psychic jolt than those two prior photo series is how she captures the sexual tension that exists before a first kiss between strangers (or even, new lovers). It’s touch taken to a far more intimate place. Also, she’s not limited to one picture of a single frozen moment, instead her camera lingers in the succeeding moments of awkwardness leading up to the instant when the subjects’ shyness and nerves give way to saliva-swapping intimacy.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that she picked 20 attractive strangers and asked them to kiss. The brilliance that keeps her project from becoming a beautiful trifle, something like a fashion film, is how she trains the viewer’s focus on the play between our inhibitions and erotic curiosity. Rather than show us their sexy surfaces, she shows us the currents just beneath the skin.
We get to peer into the strangers’ intimate moment, as they prepare to mash faces together. We are them, as they wait unsure when exactly they should start kissing. We easily imagine how amazing the first press of flesh to flesh must feel as we watch them finally kiss. Everyone involved, viewer and subject, is reminded of the simple power of a first kiss.
And the reactions to the kisses, how long the subjects linger and what they do after they kiss … well, I’ll leave that for you to enjoy.
