It Felt Like a Kiss

Like many of Curtis’ documentaries (The Century of the Self, The Trap, The Power of Nightmares), Kiss consists primarily of footage painstakingly culled from the BBC’s video archives. But this unrelenting montage of found footage — blending ads, propaganda films, Pillow Talk and other Day/Hudson vehicles, crime-scene photos, behind-the-scenes footage of both a fashion shoot and the making of Rosemary’s Baby and much, much more — set to a nearly unbroken stream of pop music is stylistically unlike anything Curtis has made before.“The imaginary seemed so real, and the world outside became like a dream,” reads one on-screen title. This dangerous ambiguity is Curtis’ true subject: reality as filtered through dreams and nightmares, fictions created, consciously or not, as distractions. With its seemingly random juxtapositions creating a wall of visuals as thickly, intricately woven as the wall of sound that serves as much of the soundtrack, Curtis has called Kiss “an attempt to do history as if it was from the point of view of living through it.” It’s a portrait of the peak of American hegemony giving way to its demise — a transition only perceptible from the vantage point of the future.