The First 10 Romance Films Ever Made

The oldest surviving animated film, Pauvre Pierrot (1892) depicts a young man named Arlequin sneaking to his lover's house at night. The young woman, Colombine, comes out to greet him, but their flirting is interrupted by Pierrot, who is also courting her. Pierrot gives Colombine flowers and attempts to serenade her. Arlequin scares Pierrot off, leaving him alone with Colombine.

The director was Charles-Émile Reynaud, who invented an animated moving-picture system called optical theater in 1888. The film consisted of 500 individually-painted images, all hand-drawn on sheets of glass.

Reynaud held screenings of Pauvre Pierrot, along with two other animated films, in a museum show entitled Pantomimes Lumineuses. Over the course of eight years, the show was attended by over 500,000 people.

Directed by Alexander Black, Miss Jerry (1894) was technically not a film, but a 45-minute series of posed slides projected onto a screen with music and narration added. When it was first screened at Carbon Studio in New York City, it was dubbed “the first picture play,” as previous live-action footage and peep-show animations were not narrative films.

The film’s protagonist, Geraldine “Jerry” Holbrook, takes a job as a journalist to help her financially struggling father. Over time she falls in love with the newspaper’s editor, Mr. Hamilton. When Mr. Hamilton decides to accept a job in London, Jerry declares her love for him. They become engaged and leave for London together.

Author and film historian Terry Ramsaye has said of Miss Jerry, “[The] sheer force of the evolution of expression presented the world with an interesting paradox—the birth of the photoplay upon the screen… The plan was to make the pictures successively blend into one another in the dissolving stereopticon, avoiding an optical ‘jar’ as much as possible. Each picture represented a step forward in the action.”

The Kiss (1896)—also known as The May Irwin Kiss, The Rice-Irwin Kiss, and The Widow Jones—was one of the first films shown commercially to the public. Directed by William Heise for Edison Studios, this eighteen-second film depicts actors May Irwin and John Rice sharing a kiss in a reenactment of a scene from the play The Widow Jones.

As this was the first kiss ever shown on film, it was considered shocking and obscene to critics and audiences at the time, and was banned in several cities. The Roman Catholic Church publicly denounced it and called for censorship and moral reform. Some reviews even called for the police to put an end to screenings of the film.

One of many scathing reviews stated, “Neither participant is physically attractive, and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to bear… Magnified to Gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting… and the performance comes very near being indecent in its emphasized vulgarity.”

In 1808, German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published Faust: A Tragedy, a play about a famed scholar who sells his soul to the devil. In 1855, the play was adapted into a romantic opera entitled Faust and Marguerite.

In the opera, Dr. Faust falls in love with a woman named Marguerite, and courts her with the help of the demon Mephistopheles. However, their courtship is cursed by demonic influence, as Faust impregnates and then abandons Marguerite. In the end, Marguerite is imprisoned and executed for infanticide.

Directing pioneer Georges Méliès directed the first film adaptation, Faust et Marguerite (1897). The film has since been lost, and there are no records of the cast or crew.

The first romance film starring black actors, Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898) starred vaudeville actress Gertie Brown and theater composer Saint Suttle. Both were members of the dance group Rag-Time Four, which performed variations of the cakewalk dance.

In this intimate scene, Brown and Suttle hug, kiss, laugh, and playfully perform dance moves, which implies they were at the studio to perform the cakewalk on film. In a time when racist caricatures pervaded the media, Something Good stands out as a positive, authentic portrayal of African-Americans for its time.

University of Chicago film professor Allyson Nadia Field has said, “There’s a performance there because they’re dancing with one another, but their kissing has an unmistakable sense of naturalness, pleasure, and amusement as well… It’s not a corrective to all the racialized misrepresentation, but it shows us that that’s not the only thing that was going on.”

Directed by British film pioneer George Albert Smith, The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) is a romantic comedy portraying a couple kissing while riding in a train. The man was played by Smith himself, and the woman was played by his wife, Laura Bayley.

The film contains utilized a then-popular filming technique called the phantom ride, where a camera is positioned onto the front of a moving vehicle, allowing viewers to see the railroad tracks from the forefront of the train. The film also cuts from the exterior shot of the train to the interior shots of the train car, showing one of the earliest uses of narrative editing.

Though Smith is credited as director, the only scene he directed was the one taking place in the train car. He provided the footage to the Warwick Trading Company, who added the train footage, including footage from View from an Engine Front—Train Leaving Tunnel (1899), directed by Cecil Hepworth.

Four years after the scandal caused by The Kiss (1896), which starred two middle-aged actors, Edison Studios remade the film with younger and more conventionally attractive actors.

Interestingly, while the first film was considered obscene for its portrayal of an intimate moment, The Kiss (1900) was released without any controversy or public outcry, despite being longer and portraying more passion and physicality between the two actors.

Though the actress’s identity is unknown, the lead actor is known to be Fred Ott, who appeared in some of the earliest movies ever made. He starred in Edison Kinetoscope Record of a Sneeze (1894) and Fred Ott Holding a Bird (1894). He also co-directed Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1984), the first union of moving pictures with audio.

Three years after the first film adaption of the opera Faust and Marguerite, Edwin S. Porter directed another adaption that was distributed by the Edison Company. This one is considerably more light-hearted than its source material, and has a happy ending as opposed to the opera's tragic outcome.

Faust and Marguerite are conversing in front of a fireplace when the demon Mephistopheles appears. He pulls out a sword and commands Faust to behead Marguerite. When Faust refuses, Mephistopheles tries to do it himself. But somehow Faust and Marguerite can appear and disappear at will, and they dodge his sword at every turn.

Frustrated, Mephistopheles gives up and vanishes. The couple reappear and are promptly married, triumphing over the demon.

William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet—the story of a doomed relationship between teenagers from feuding families—was first performed in 1597. The titular characters fall in love at first sight and secretly marry, but are ultimately torn apart by their families' violent rivalry.

In 1867, the play was adapted into an opera, Roméo et Juliette, by French composer Charles Gounod. The first film version of the play, directed by Clément Maurice and released in 1900, featured actor Emilio Cossira singing a tenor aria from the opera, declaring his love for Juliet.

This film was produced by Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, which premiered one of the first synchronized sound film systems at the 1900 Paris Exposition. In addition to Cossira, the exhibition also featured famed actress Sarah Bernhardt in Le Duel d'Hamlet (1900), another early film adaptation of a Shakespeare play.

A comedy directed by Edwin S. Porter, Love by the Light of the Moon (1901) combines animation and live-action to portray a Man on the Moon spying on a young couple kissing at a garden gate.

A young man invites a young woman to sit on a bench beside him. As they begin kissing, the moon moves closer to them, with a voyeuristic grin on his face. The woman notices the moon and faints from shock, landing in her boyfriend’s arms.

Porter would later direct the similarly-titled but unrelated film By the Light of the Moon (1911), which was about a couple who board a plane together and elope against her father’s wishes.