A man pleads. The woman refuses. He implores again, only to be rebuffed. Now he’s down on his knees, to her miffed indifference. Finally, he steals the kiss he’s been asking for, gets playfully pushed away and the give-and-take continues: flirtatious, sensuous, uninhibited.
The scene is from “Something Good — Negro Kiss,” a film made in 1898 starring vaudeville luminaries Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown. But this isn’t the clip that resurfaced at the University of Southern California in 2017. Unlike that 19-second fragment, this version of “Something Good — Negro Kiss” — identified at the National Library of Norway soon after the USC discovery — is more than twice as long.
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