The (Video) Art of Kissing. Notes for a Philematology of Moving Image

Since its origins, cinema has explored the revolutionary charge of the encounter of the lips, the capability of kissing to allow the spectator not only to see the events represented on screen, but also to take part in them empathetically by eliciting desire. With the aim of outlining an agenda for a cinematic philematology (from philema, the Greek for kiss ), the article proposes an experimental psychological approach to cinematic emotions. My hypothesis is that, in some cases, when watching a kissing scene, spectators actually experience radical relationship, a reciprocal dependence between two moving and interacting entities that do not necessarily correspond to human bodies. In support of this hypothesis, I recall two very classic experimental psychology demonstrations that were put forward in Europe in the 1940s: Fritz Heider s and Marianne Simmel s demonstration on social illusion (1944) and Albert Michotte s experiments on attribution of causality (1946). In both the cases, the movement of simple geometric shapes was described by observers in terms of the reciprocal behaviour of figures, which move depending on a cause-effect relationship. Although quite rudimentary and simplistic, these pioneering experiments proved that some conceptual and semantic structures are prefigured in the corresponding perceptual structures. Even though faced with mere images, spectators have a natural and endemic tendency to ascribe human, narrative and intentional features to moving bodies.