If each of Warhol's early films is, in its own way, a distillation of the cinema, Kiss might be the melodrama, melted-down. In consecutive sequences of couples kissing-a series of 100-foot reels, shot in fixed-frame, close-up, and silent, that roll by, ragged film ends and all-we witness The Kiss in its many variations from passionate to impassive, tender to uptight. The extraordinary power of the close-up kiss was only suggested in Hollywood films from Garbo's The Kiss to A Place in the Sun, but here it is extracted from narrative content, refined and abstracted: Kiss is a meditation on what the camera can find in a human face, so that the most minute movement of cheekbone or eyelash becomes an event, action. With time, and at 16 frames per second, the kiss is distilled even further, so that the image becomes what it is: a black-and-white configuration. Part documentary, part anti-genre; part realism, part put-on, Kiss is also the most extreme case, short of pornography, of the cinematic act of voyeurism. It is innocent foreplay to Couch (1964).