Kiss
Eat
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Kiss
Directed by Andy Warhol.
With Naomi Levine, Gerald Malanga, Baby Jane Holzer.
US, 1963, 16mm, black & white, 54 min.
Updating the Edison Company's early cinematic production The Kiss (1896), Warhol featured a group of his Factory regulars performing the titled act in extreme close-ups. Mixing genders, sexual orientations, and races in his documentation of serial couplings (each one lasting approximately one camera roll), Warhol reserved the film’s only significant camera movement (a zoom out) to confirm the gender of the participants in the work’s first gay sequence.
Another experiment with endurance and chronology, Warhol frames the noted pop artist Robert Indiana (along with his cat) as he very slowly samples a mushroom. The use of Indiana was not accidental. The artist had exhibited his “Eat” paintings and sculptures at the Stable Gallery in New York, which also represented Warhol at the time. The film was shot in Indiana’s studio on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan.