Running from January 13 to February 5, 2022, To Save and Project: The 18th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation includes more than 60 newly preserved features and shorts from 19 countries, many having world or North American premieres and presented in original versions not seen since their initial theatrical releases.
At the dawn of movie-making, having people kiss on camera was a risqué way to pull in audiences still getting used to this new medium. The first of these tiny love stories was Thomas Edison s 1896 short,
The Kiss, which featured two white performers. Two years later, Black vaudeville actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown smilingly puckered up in short by director and studio-founder William Selig titled
Something Good-Negro Kiss. Rediscovered in 2017 by Dino Everett, a film archivist at the University of Southern California,
Something Good is thought to be the earliest kiss between Black people on film. The Kiss 1898 Credit: