The Kiss, 1984-1985

The Kiss explores a cliché of classical Hollywood narrative. The images belong to a classic film, Body and Soul, directed by Robert Rossen in 1947 about a young boxer corrupted by worldly success. The kissing scene takes place in the apartment doorway of his fiancée: a long kiss that both begins and ends the physical relationship, which remains frozen and inconclusive. The girl closes the door to her room, the protagonist returning to the street. In Raphael Montañez Ortiz hands, the seven-second scene becomes six long minutes. Slowing to the extreme such an iconographic sequence as a kiss, it is converted into a syncopated and spasmodic action, absurd in its cardiac rhythm. The cinematographic archive of Hollywood is an extraordinary source for confirming that the law of what can be said is stipulated by a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial. Raphael Montañez takes existing footage to show stereotypes and exclusion patterns generated by the usual visual narratives emerging from the American factory.