What a Kiss Actually Is

Most kisses onscreen are transactions. Film kisses, ad kisses, porn kisses—they all perform something, signal something, close a deal. The emotion is there to be read by an audience, not felt between the people involved. You get used to that without noticing you’ve gotten used to it.

Artist Anne Sorrentino’s videos are about the other kind. Two people, lips meeting, eyes closed, and whatever’s happening between them doesn’t seem to be for anyone else. What she captures is the energy of it—not the romance-film version, but something more primal and harder to fake. The focus, the stillness, the sense that two people have agreed to be briefly in the same place in a way that goes beyond proximity.

I think about kisses I remember. Not all of them—just the ones where time did that thing where it slowed down and I became very aware of my own breathing. Those are rare. Most of what gets sold to us as intimacy is physical logistics performed with feeling. The real thing, the kind Sorrentino is pointing at, is something you recognize immediately when it happens and spend a long time afterwards trying to get back to.