The Kuleshov Effect

Introduction

When Lev Kuleshov was sitting at the editing table, cutting and splicing footage for his first film in 1918, he realised the interaction between shots created new meanings that did not exist in the individual images. Kuleshov began experimenting with how the arrangement of shots could be used to manipulate the audience’s perception of an image or sequence.

The Kuleshov effect refers to the way viewers construct meaning by making links between shots in the montage. We are going to explore this process and the filmmaker’s concept of creative geography.

Kuleshov’s Experiment

Kuleshov alternated an image of Ivan Mozzhukhin, a star of the silent era of Russian cinema, with three different shots. a bowl of soup, a young girl in a coffin, and a woman lying on a couch. Have a look at this version of the sequence:

When viewers were asked to interpret the actor’s performance in the edited film, their reaction depended on the connections they made between the close-up of Mozzhukhin’s face and the other shots.

In the first combination, the image of soup suggested the actor was hungry.

After the image of the young girl in the coffin, the audience believed they saw immense sorrow on the actor’s face.

The third combination evoked lust.

Kuleshov’s experiment demonstrated meanings are not fixed. Although the shot of Mozzhukhin’s blank expression remained the same throughout, the audience’s interpretation of the portrait changed depending on its relationship to other images in the sequence.

In semiotics, this sort of relationship between signs is a syntagm.

The filmmaker even argued the editing of a segment was more important than the actor’s performance in constructing meaning and engaging the audience. He concluded that “the fundamental source of cinematic impact upon the viewer… is montage” – the arrangement of shots.

Try to replicate Kuleshov’s experiment by making your own shot combinations and see if you can determine the audience’s reaction to an image of a contemporary actor. Of course, the flicker of low-resolution images in the original footage might be more open to interpretation compared to our era of high-definition media.

Creative Geography

When shooting Engineer Prite’s Project (1918), Kuleshov was unable to film his leading characters walking across a meadow to look at electric cables on a pole due to “technical circumstances”. Instead, he created the segment by intercutting a shot of the actors looking upwards and a shot of a pole taken in a completely different area of Moscow.

Only a partial reconstruction of the film exists, but the following shots from the original footage should give you a sense of what Kuleshov was trying to achieve in the scene:

The filmmaker was fascinated by how he could use the editing process to “create a new earthly terrain that did not exist anywhere”. To the audience, it seemed like the characters and the poles were in the same place and the action was continuous.

Kuleshov called the effect the “artificial landscape”.

He experimented with this creative geography in his next film, The Red Frontier (1920).

He filmed one actor walking along a street in Moscow. He filmed another actor two miles away along the embankment. They smile at each other as if they are in the same location. Kuleshov then filmed them meeting at Boulevard Prechistensk which is an entirely different section of the city.

When the two actors, Aleksandra Khokhlova and Leonid Obolensky, look beyond the camera, Kuleshov cut to a shot of the White House he had lifted from an American film.

The “organisation of the material” into a sequence was enough to convince the audience the scene took place in Washington and the actors were climbing steps into the famous building.

The next time you watch an exterior shot of characters entering a building and the director cuts to an interior shot of the space, think about how you are connecting the two images.

Kuleshov and Contemporary Media

Although the Kuleshov effect comes from the early days of silent cinema, its principles are still used by filmmakers and other media producers today. For instance, an advertisement might include a close-up of an actor followed by a shot of a luxury car, leading viewers to associate the person’s expression with desire for the product. It is also important to critically assess how quick editing impacts the user on social media, especially TikTok videos.

If you want to learn more about how filmmakers use the arrangement of shots to construct meaning, read our introduction to Christian Metz and his grand syntagm. You should also look at the impact Kuleshov’s theory had on other directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s concept of pure cinema.