The Kuleshov Effect

 

If you had to pinpoint a place associated with the origins of modern cinema, what would you say? America? Hollywood? France perhaps? Even England? Leeds?! One experiment that suggests otherwise is the Kuleshov Effect, an aesthetic investigation conducted in the 1910s and 1920s by (you guessed it), Lev Kuleshov, a film theorist and practitioner working in Russia – known then as the Soviet Union. As with many of the greatest ideas, the principle of The Kuleshov Effect was deceptively simple. According to Kuleshov, spectators derive more meaning from the interaction of two shots edited into a sequence than if these spectators had been shown the shots separately.

In order to illustrate this theory, Kuleshov thus made a little film, composed of, on the on hand, three unchanging close-ups of the impassive face of Ivan Mosjoukine, a Soviet film star; and, on the other hand, three different objects: a bowl of soup, a girl dead in a coffin, and a woman lying seductively on a divan sofa. After each object was shown, so too was the same shot of Mosjoukine, generating, in turn, a variety of readings of this footage. Some spectators, for example, had the curious impression that Mosjoukine was looking at these objects. Others thought that his facial features changed, ever so slightly, with each cut, even though the same shot was, in fact used. Noa Steimatsky, for instance, describes Kuleshov’s footage as depicting ‘a neutral face which gains expression through editing’. Still other spectators went further: professing their conviction that Mosjoukine was experiencing an array of different emotions, namely, hunger, sadness, and lust. But what do you think is happening in this experiment? Watch it here and find out.    ​

Want to know more?

Read about the Kuleshov Effect here.

Watch a recent version of the experiment here.

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