Kuleshov Effect
The Kuleshov was an editing montage technique which was made popular in early Soviet cinema by Lev Kuleshov. It looked at the relationship between two shots that followed each other and how it was not just important to look at the separate parts, it was more than that. Kuleshov concluded that the effect of the cinema on the audience was down to the montage of alternating shots and sequences within the film.
Kuleshov began doing experiments with his new idea, testing audience reactions to certain images where he discovered that they had a psychological, emotional reaction which differed from person to person depending on their life experiences e.g. a grown man would react differently to an image of a naked woman in comparison to a child.
He also said that the audience relate something they don't recognise to something that they know and therefore get a certain emotion from it.
In Kuleshov's most famous experiment he used the face of famous Soviet actor Ivan Mosjoukine. He showed three clips (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin and a woman laying on a sofa) followed by the shot of the actor's face to an audience who believed that the expression of the actor was different each time with him expressing hunger, sadness and desire. The shot of the actor was actually the same each time. Vsevolod Pudovkin (claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) said in 1929 that the audience "raved about the acting... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the last with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."
This experiment showed Kuleshov that film editing was effective and useful in cinema. The conclusion that he drew was viewers brought their own emotional reactions to the sequences of images and they saw these reactions from the actor, transferring their own feelings towards the images onto his expressionless face. He said that each shot was not determined just by its content, but also the relationship to the shot before or after. He found that the meaning the audience decode from two shots joined together goes beyond what is contained in each shot. Due to Kuleshov, audiences began to understand the entire film rather than just the individual shots put together and saw film editing as a lot more than the sum of the parts of the film.
Kuleshov began doing experiments with his new idea, testing audience reactions to certain images where he discovered that they had a psychological, emotional reaction which differed from person to person depending on their life experiences e.g. a grown man would react differently to an image of a naked woman in comparison to a child.
He also said that the audience relate something they don't recognise to something that they know and therefore get a certain emotion from it.
In Kuleshov's most famous experiment he used the face of famous Soviet actor Ivan Mosjoukine. He showed three clips (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin and a woman laying on a sofa) followed by the shot of the actor's face to an audience who believed that the expression of the actor was different each time with him expressing hunger, sadness and desire. The shot of the actor was actually the same each time. Vsevolod Pudovkin (claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) said in 1929 that the audience "raved about the acting... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the last with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."
This experiment showed Kuleshov that film editing was effective and useful in cinema. The conclusion that he drew was viewers brought their own emotional reactions to the sequences of images and they saw these reactions from the actor, transferring their own feelings towards the images onto his expressionless face. He said that each shot was not determined just by its content, but also the relationship to the shot before or after. He found that the meaning the audience decode from two shots joined together goes beyond what is contained in each shot. Due to Kuleshov, audiences began to understand the entire film rather than just the individual shots put together and saw film editing as a lot more than the sum of the parts of the film.
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