If you looked out the north-facing windows of the N-Judah line in San Francisco on Sunday, as the train traveled along Duboce Ave, you might have seen a cadre of nine actors running, stumbling, hugging, kissing, laughing, joyously (and sometimes gingerly) flinging their bodies at each other, exclaiming greetings, mimicking bodies in slow motion, putting on an affectionate show.
This was Hugging and Kissing, a film brought into being exclusively through the windows of the train.
The piece had its origins in a question I've been asking myself for some time: what makes a film? Where, from the perspective of genre or category, does film begin and end? Must film be recorded video, or sequential still image? Must it be captured at all?
My thesis was the following: film exists, is made, by cropping. The paramount characteristic of film, therefore, beyond duration, sequence etc, is the fact of looking through the bounded frame.
In Hugging and Kissing, the film is created by the train window, which acts both as lens and screen, framing and making discrete the scenes which take place outside.
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Before Hugging and Kissing, there were these notes on what I dubbed "the Curious Gaze":
When sitting on a bus one night, all twelve riders were on a personal device of some kind. Only the driver was looking out into the world, and this position of observation was made permissible (and necessary) based on the driver’s assigned task — to safely navigate the roads of the city, avoiding accident or injury for those on the bus and the other people moving about the city.
In a world in which everyone has a device, permission to look has been revoked. Except, that is, if we look upon the world through a lens, or mediated by a screen.
With the rise of vlogging culture, long-form on YouTube and short-form on TikTok, we have created a culture of permissible voyeurism. While we are not permitted (or it is more difficult) to look and observe the world in an unmediated way (e.g. not through a lens or screen), we have created distinct form and packaging for such voyeurism to persist.
Previously, an observer of life and people would have had access in public (e.g. in towns and cities) or closer proximities (neighbors) but would have more rarely gained insight into the minute personal trivialities of a person's day. Now we have access to these minutiae (see: morning routine, nighttime routine, what I eat in a day) and more as reported, documented, or fabricated by the person who experiences them. But it has become more uncomfortable or uncommon to observe people as they really are, unmitigated by their own editorial choices.
When riding the bus or the train, when moving through tunnels or traveling at night, the large window panes become lenses and screens, flattening the scenes opposite them, displaying the riders back to themselves. In looking at these tableaus, it is possible to observe the other riders.
The whole field of vision as captured by the window becomes a distinctly bounded scene, framed to a roughly 3:4 aspect ratio. Gestures and postures become iconified, and colors are dampened to a gray-scale-adjacent replication of reality. The angle at which the windows sit in the body of the bus or train causes the images and figures reflected there to become distorted, people often appearing slightly longer and thinner than they are, the direct over-head lighting enhancing the severity of jawlines and the hollows of cheekbones.
It is extremely rare that we meet the eyes of another person in the reflection of the window. Our gaze is free to roam, to observe unreservedly. But most frequently, if we meet anyone’s gaze, it is our own, centering our own image, our own character, as the central player in the scene.
Of course, it is possible to simply look down the train car or bus and observe people directly, but the isolation and particular photographic articulation of what one sees in the window panes creates a differently digestible, and acceptable, way of watching.
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As I conceptualized Hugging and Kissing, I initially resisted the idea that there would be any video documentation of the film. Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of what I was doing? Ultimately, mid-hug, I ran aboard the train myself and captured, on video, the film as it played out, timed beautifully as one long pan.
I believe that there is a readily understood distinction between film and video of films being played. We understand that there is a distinction between watching Die Hard the film and watching a bootleg video someone has recorded of Die Hard playing on a screen. We understand that the experience of watching Moana is distinct from watching Moana via illicit TikTok live-stream, the movie playing out on a laptop screen, captured by an iPhone camera. It is understood that video of a film captures the film and something beyond it, drawing our attention in this meta-format to the practical concerns of the film's state of being played.
The same is true of the videos captured of the film Hugging and Kissing. In their raw formats, we hear in these videos the bell of the train, the whine of engines, and the chatter of the audience. It is understood that these videos capture the film as it plays across the screen (the window), along with the physical surroundings of the screen (the train as vehicle, the passengers), which sets these videos firmly in the realm of documentation of a film being played and not in the realm of being the film itself.
