The Selig catalogue describes this as a burlesque on the May Irwin Kiss (1896). What is interesting is that the couple were actually dance partners at this time, in 1898, and this close relationship seems evident in their genuine displays of affection. It has been described as the earliest-known onscreen depiction of black intimacy.
This film was part of a small collection of nitrate short reels, all from around 1900. One of the reels, featuring a Civil War scene, was stamped “Lubin Standard 50ft,” but the others were all unidentified. This particular reel jumped out from the rest due to the presence of some Lumière-style circular perforations that had been printed through from the original negative. The content did not appear to be foreign in nature, so we quickly zeroed in on the Selig company, who had copied the Lumière camera. A search across other archives brought forth similar-looking prints, which cemented the film’s identity as a Selig. Then there was the search to identify the performers and title. Film scholar Allyson Field, my partner on the research, mentioned an often-cited Selig film called Something Good – Negro Kiss, from 1903. Field and Ron Magliozzi from MoMA were able to use analog face recognition to identify the male performer as Saint Suttle. At the same time we began to notice that the film pre-dated 1903, as it was included in the Selig Inventory papers of 1900 at the Margaret Herrick library. Likewise, a photo of the pair found in the National Police Gazette from 1898 revealed the female performer to be Gertie Brown.
Suttle and Brown were performing as Cake Walk partners as early as May 1898, and in the Selig inventory and catalogues there is a Cake Walk film listed right next to Something Good. It is possible that the pair was hired for the dance film and did the second one simultaneously. The Cake Walk film shows up in the Fall 1898 Sears catalogue, and a film called Kiss Scene is listed in the Spring 1899 edition with the exact same description as the 1903 Selig catalogue. Since Suttle and Brown’s dance partnership lasted only through the end of 1898, it seems unlikely that they shot the Kiss Scene at any other time than Spring or Summer 1898.
The film was in good physical shape except for the perforations, which were almost all torn and broken. Like many films of this age these same perforations had distorted wildly, with one side still looking normal but the other more like small Fox holes. The decision was made to scan the 45-ft. film frame-by-frame at a 3K resolution on a small 35mm negative still-image scanner. We then went in and did frame-by-frame clean-up and stabilization, and ultimately output it to film at Colorlab. We decided to print the film three times in succession because it is so short. Obviously purists might take issue with this, but we felt it offers a good way for audiences to study it.

Dino Everett