Brief, perfunctory scene that moves plot forward without emotional depth — exposition or transition. You play it once and move on.
A kiss-off is the art of getting a scene done quickly and lightly so it doesn't become an obstacle. You need this information conveyed — a character development, plot exposition, a transitional motivation — but the story doesn't require you to linger. So you play it off. A general rule: if a scene doesn't have at least one emotional or dramatic goal driving the tension forward, it's a candidate for a kiss-off.
On set, it works like this: you reduce the staging to its bare essentials. No long takes, no elaborate camera work, no fine-tuning of the performance. One or two setups — possibly even a single shot — clear lighting, shot for the edit. The actors perform functionally, not psychologically deep. The music invites a light, casual mood or is absent altogether. In the worst case, you only need voice-over or even just off-screen dialogue while the camera shows the visual equivalent — someone drives away, enters a room, nods in agreement. This saves you a full scene.
Practically, a kiss-off saves you time and budget — and that's often the honest motivation. You have 45 shooting days and 90 pages of script. Not every scene can get 8 takes. The kiss-off is your permission to handle 15 percent of the material dryly so that the 20 percent of genuine confrontations or turning points can breathe. In the edit, you place these scenes as transitions between the big moments, or you cut them together as breathers — just long enough for the audience to grasp what happened and why the next moment matters.
The kiss-off differs from the mere idea of a montage in that it doesn't aim to be a narrative artwork — montage tells a story through rhythmic cuts and musical structure. The kiss-off is quieter, more functional, almost invisible. You don't realize you're watching a kiss-off scene because it doesn't look like a scene. It looks like life happening incidentally. Good directors use them ruthlessly — and bad-looking films have too many of them and make them too visible.