Their first attempts at kissing, which interrupt a steady (and of course silent) stream of talk, are odd, sideways forays. She is snuggled against him, with her face turned away from his and toward the camera at about a 45-degree angle. The man and the woman in the frame - a good-natured pair whose interaction is more playful than earnestly amorous - sit next to each other. What happens when you put two of them together? The very first moving-picture kiss, in a 25-second short made by Thomas Edison in 1896, shows the problem clearly.
The great movie stars are not necessarily the most talented actors, or even the best-looking human beings, but rather those whose eyes, mouths and cheekbones compel attention when rendered in two dimensions.
The apotheosis of the cinematic art, the point at which it has been said (by wiser critics than I) to approach the condition of holiness, is the close-up, which endows an individual visage with aesthetic dignity and ontological gravity. In other words, whatever else a kiss may be, it is for filmmakers above all a formal challenge. But the movie camera has the uncanny power to reveal unseen intimacies, to frame and diagram what we otherwise know as a frenzy of sensation.
What you see, if for some reason you keep your eyes open, might be the blurred bridge of a nose (your own? his? hers?), an errant lock of hair, a patch of ceiling, sidewalk or dashboard. But one thing real kisses always are to the people engaged in them is invisible. They established a glamorous iconography and an elegant choreography for an experience that, in real life, is frequently sloppy, clumsy and less than perfectly graceful.
What is undeniable is that movies - Hollywood movies especially, but far from exclusively - made kissing more visible.
Cinema may not have invented kissing, but I suspect that over the course of the 20th century, movies helped make it more essential. These are loaded questions, and with some variation they have haunted every generation of ticket buyers and channel surfers, all the way back to the days of the nickelodeon. Who was your first kiss? Not the actual, physical kiss - that is really none of my business - but a witnessed meeting of two mouths on-screen? Was it the smooching pooches in “The Lady and the Tramp,” their lips serendipitously joined by a strand of spaghetti? Jack and Rose in the boiler room of the Titanic? Jack and Ennis in “Brokeback Mountain”? Cher and Nicolas Cage in “Moonstruck”? Or was it an older, more canonical osculation, from the era when a kiss was as far as an on-screen pair were allowed to go, with or without the benefit of clergy? Bogey and Bergman in “Casablanca”? Bergman and Cary Grant in “Notorious”? Grant and Eva Marie Saint or Grace Kelly or Katharine Hepburn? Did you think it was gross? Boring? Sexy? Romantic? Did it get in the way of the action, or was it the action you wanted to see? Did you learn anything about your own desires or your techniques for fulfilling them? Were you moved to emulate what you saw on-screen, perhaps with the person sitting next to you in the dark? Were you able to keep watching?