The world’s first filmed kiss has been resurrected for Valentine’s Day after laying unrecognised in photography books for more than a century.

The images of two unclothed women kissing were created by pioneering Kingston photographer Eadweard Muybridge between 1872 and 1885 using a bank of still cameras firing in sequence.

The eight-frame sequence predates the 1896 film The Kiss, showing an actor and actress re-enact the final scene from The Widow Jones, which was selected for preservation by the United States Library of Congress in 1999.

American artist and academic David Gordon compiled the frames – first published as plate 444 in Muybridge’s book Animal Locomotion – into a digital loop to bring the kiss to life once more.

Mr Gordon said: “At any time a scholar could have realised plate 444 was the first filmed kiss, they just didn’t. When I saw it in Boston public library’s rare books department, I immediately knew I wanted to bring it back to life through animation.

“Romance has always been important to film and it is worthwhile correcting the historical record. Who would have guessed it would be between two naked women?

“That this film is so different from the previous contenders for the first filmed kiss will shock some and I hope intrigue many more.”

Mr Gordon, who teaches in Beverly, Massachusetts, is creating a short film called Victorian Dream from Muybridge’s photos, and hopes to visit and lecture in Kingston.

After encountering difficulties gaining access to Muybridge’s images, he created an online archive where he plans to release the animation on Valentine’s Day.

He said: “I am an artist with a love of collaboration seeking to use technology in new ways. Digital technology provided me an opportunity to form an artistic partnership with a man long dead.

“In the process of working on this project I have fallen in love with Muybridge’s images, as beautiful photographs, as historical documents, as a means to understand human and animal motion and as source material for my own art.”

Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston in 1830 but moved to America in 1852. He returned to Kingston in the 1890s, where he died in 1904, bequeathing his equipment and prints to Kingston Museum.

The film will be unveiled on muybridge.org on Monday, February 14.