Kuleshov Effect: History, Definition, and importance

What is ⭐KULESHOV EFFECT⭐ Lev Kuleshov, was born in January 1899. He directed his first movie in 1917, worked with a documentary crew covering the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1920, and headed the first Soviet film courses at The National Film School, where he became a leader in Soviet Montage Theory.

Kuleshov was fascinated by the power of film editing to manipulate emotion. He put a lot of thought into the juxtaposition of shots, epitomized in a short film demonstration known today as “The Kuleshov Effect”. Kuleshov intended for his short film to show how an audience’s perception of something onscreen changes, depending on what they see in relationship to that thing.

Specifically, he showed a single shot of a man, purposefully expressionless, intercut with three other shots: a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a woman lying on a couch:

Kuleshov alternated the shot of the expressionless man with these three shots. Although the shot of the man was unchanged each time it appeared onscreen, the audience’s perception of his expression changed. When paired with the soup, the audience saw hunger. When paired with the girl in the coffin, the audience saw sorrow. When paired with the woman on the couch, the audience saw lust.

By pairing the image of the man – essentially a human “blank slate” – with each of these images, Kuleshov manipulated the audience’s idea of and reaction to what they were seeing, simply by implying that the man was “looking at” whatever was shown. In other words, “the dramatic effect of a film was found not in the content of its shots but rather in the edits that join them together.” Michael Toscano elaborates, revealing how profound this discovery was:

“Kuleshov was right to emphasize the power that editing has over motion pictures, even to the point of bending the inner ‘reality’ of shots. What stunned Kuleshov was the incredible flexibility of the medium, and, with that in mind, the power it granted him to provide moving pictures with new contextual meanings. Such authority over meaning strikes us as obvious today, but at the time the ‘photographic’ image was held to be a totally faithful, ‘concrete,’ inviolably ‘true’ artifact, free of the shortcomings of subjectivity.”

Kuleshov’s legacy isn’t his contributions as a filmmaker so much as his groundbreaking contributions as a film theorist. Many of his students – including Sergei Eisenstein! – applied and built upon his principles, making films that today are regarded as classics.