Kuleshov Effect

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The Origins of the Kuleshov Effect

Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker who worked as a newsreel cameraman during the 1917 Russian Revolution. After the revolution, he founded the Kuleshov Workshop, an arm of the Moscow Film School that attracted students interested in pushing boundaries and experimenting with creative editing techniques.

While teaching at the Moscow Film School, Kuleshov conducted an experiment to demonstrate how a viewer’s interpretation of a character's facial expression can be influenced through juxtaposition with a second image. He edited a close-up of an expressionless man, Tsarist silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine, together with three alternate ending shots: a dead child in a coffin, a bowl of soup, and a woman lying on a divan. Then, Kuleshov showed the three miniature films to three separate audiences and asked viewers to interpret what the man was thinking.

Audiences who saw the image of the dead child believed the man’s expression indicated sadness. When followed by a plate of soup, they interpreted the man’s expression as hunger. And when paired with the image of the reclining woman, audiences assumed the man experienced lust.

In reality, the man’s expression was identical in all three miniature films, but how audiences interpreted that expression—as sadness, hunger, or lust—depended entirely on the image that followed. From then on, filmmakers had the language to describe how audiences interpret facial expressions based on the larger context of the scene.

from Masterclass.com