Kuleshov

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KULESHOV EFFECT: Robert Butz offers the following: The name given to the mental tendency of viewers to attempt to figure out how filmed shots fit together, even if the shots are totally unrelated. This effect was noted and articulated by Soviet director and film theoretician Lev (Leo) Kuleshov, who was appointed head of the newsreel section at the Moscow film studios early in the post-revolutionary period. Around 1919, Kuleshov began a series of editing experiments which led to a startling discovery (in what has become known as the "Mozhukhin Experiment"). In separate sequences, shots of various objects (a bowl of soup, a smiling child, and a dead body), were juxtaposed against identical archive clips of a famous actor (Ivan Mozhukhin). The audience read a different meaning into Mozhukhin's expression with each combination. This discovery demonstrated the power of editing to alter the perception of the subject, in this case, the actor's emotions and thoughts. The experiment also, implicitly, advanced the verisimilar acting style as the ideal for film; purportedly, Mozhukin was praised by the audience for his subtle acting abilities.

In another experiment, Kuleshov spliced together another series of shots which had been filmed entirely out of sequence and in different times and places: a waiting man, a walking woman, a gate, a staircase, and a mansion. The audience read spatial and temporal 'sense' into the sequence, deciding that they saw the man and the woman meeting in front of the gate at the same time. This demonstrated the viewer's essential role in creating a film's continuity and advanced the notion that a filmmaker creates a 'fictive space', with the freedom to shoot out of sequence and join together unrelated shots. Kuleshov used these discoveries to advance the theory of montage as the central device of cinema, later adapted by Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevelod Pudovkin.