Everything about Kuleshov Experiment totally explained
The
Kuleshov Effect is a
montage effect demonstrated by Russian filmmaker
Lev Kuleshov in about 1918.
Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol
Ivan Mozzhukhin was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, an old woman's coffin). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mozzhukhin's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mozzhukhin was the same shot repeated over and over again.
Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how 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 woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same." [Pudovkin,"Naturshchik vmesto aktera", in Sobranie sochinenii, volume I, Moscow: 1974, p.184].
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.
Alfred Hitchcock refers to the effect in his conversations with
François Truffaut, using actor
Jimmy Stewart as the example.
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 Kuleshov's view, the 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 deconstructed and re-assembled by the artist into new juxtapositions.
The montage experiments carried out by Kuleshov in the late 1910s and early 1920s 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,,
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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Kuleshov Experiment'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://kuleshov_effect.totallyexplained.com">Kuleshov Effect Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
