What is the Kuleshov Effect?
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THE DEATH RAY (CREDIT: GOSKINO)
The Kuleshov Effect is an editing effect initially demonstrated by Soviet filmmaker and film theorist, Lev Kuleshov. The basic principle of the Kuleshov Effect is that the audience derives new interpretations from composition and sequence. In fact, the interaction between shots can change the meaning altogether.
To demonstrate this, Kuleshov made a short film starring actor Ivan Mosjoukine in 1918. Kuleshov edited an expressionless close-up of the actor with a series of contextualising shots. Although Kuleshov was re-using the same expressionless shot of Mosjoukine in conjunction with other images (for example, a bowl of soup or a girl in a coffin), the audience derived different meanings for each composition. They viewed his expression as a reaction to the other image, enabling them to take a separate meaning to his acting based on the contextual information. Kuleshov theorised that this must be the fundamental basis of cinema and cinematic editing as its own art form.
Alfred Hitchock on the Kuleshov Effect
Director Alfred Hitchcock famously described the Kuleshov Effect during his interviews with French New Wave auteur François Truffaut, and again in an interview with Fletcher Markle. Here’s how the ‘master of suspense’ described the theory on the CBC television series, Telescope - A Talk with Hitchcock, in 1964:
“Pure cinematics … the assembly of film and how it can be changed to create a different idea. We have a close up. Let’s assume he sees a woman holding a baby in her arms. Now we cut back to a reaction to what he says, and he smiles. What is he? He is a kindly man, a sympathetic character.” - Alfred Hitchcock
Courtesy: CBS
“Next, you take the middle piece of film away – the woman with the child. But leave his two pieces of film as they were. Now we will put in a piece of film showing a girl in a bikini. The man looks at the girl in the bikini and he smiles. What is he now? A dirty old man! No longer the benign gentleman who loves babies. That is what film can do for its audience.” - Alfred Hitchcock
Courtesy: CBS
Who is Lev Kuleshov?
Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov (Лев Владимирович Кулешов) was a Russian and Soviet filmmaker, theorist and a founder of Moscow Film School – the world’s very first filmmaking school. He directed Soviet Montage films such as The Death Ray (1925), Your Acquaintance (1927) and The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924).
As a founder of the Moscow FIlm School, Kuleshov had many students who became famous in their own right. In the 1794 introduction to Kuleshov on Film: Writings by Lev Kuleshov, Ronald Levaco writes that “Kuleshov was the first aesthetic theorist of the cinema [...] Indeed, Kuleshov estimated that over half of the Soviet directors since 1920 had been his pupils, including most notably Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Barnet, Kaltotozov and, more recently, Parajanov.”
To learn more about Lev Kulshov and his work as a film theorist, you can seek out the following books and collections of his work: Fifty Years in Films: Selected Works, and Kuleshov on Film: Writings by Lev Kuleshov. This is a collection of essays covering Kuleshov’s theories and insights into practical filmmaking.
If you found this post useful, you may also be interested in our introduction to Soviet Montage cinema and our list of Soviet Montage films.
