Kuleshov Effect

In the beginning, I didn’t quite understand what the kuleshov effect was until i dove into the unknown and asked a few people and consulted a few sites. Now that i think of it, its a heck load of information. I hope the following information will enlighten you a bit more on the subject, as it did for me :

• The Kuleshov Effect is a film editing effect demonstrated by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s.

• Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings.

• The effect has also been studied by psychologists, and is well-known among modern film makers.

• The experiment itself was created by assembling fragments of pre-existing film from the Tsarist film industry, with no new material. Mozzhukhin had been the leading romantic "star" of Tsarist cinema, and familiar to the audience.

• Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In his point of view, cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination. The raw materials of such an art work need not be original, but are pre-fabricated elements which can be disassembled and re-assembled by the artist into new juxtapositions.

• The montage experiments carried out by Kuleshov in the late 1910’s and early 1920’s formed the theoretical basis of Soviet montage cinema, culminating in the famous films of the late 1920s by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, among others. These films included The Battleship Potemkin, October, Mother, The End of St. Petersburg, and The Man with a Movie Camera.

• Soviet montage cinema was suppressed under Stalin during the 1930s as a dangerous example of Formalism in the arts, and as being incompatible with the official Soviet artistic doctrine of Socialist Realism.



Three pairs of images from the film experiment carried out by the Russian psychologist Lev Kuleshov around 1920. Kuleshov discovered that audiences interpreted the actor's expression (the right of each pair, and all identical) in relation to the image it was paired with (left of each pair). The actor was perceived as hungry, sad, romantically intrigued, etc., depending on what was edited together with the actor. Kuleshov's results significantly influenced the development of montage theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Effect
http://faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/pages/kuleshov.html