Lev Kuleshov, a Soviet filmmaker, was among the first to dissect the effects of juxtaposition. The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect, that he demonstrated in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers take more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.
In the 20th century, cinema was a new art form, consisting of many techniques that hadn’t been fully developed. The elements of editing were among them. Filmmakers knew that you could cut and connect the film strip. However people of this time period didn’t comprehend the artistic purposes of doing so.
Through his experiments and research, Kuleshov discovered that depending on how shots are assembled the audience will attach a specific meaning or emotion to it.
In his experiment, Kuleshov cut the shot of an actor with shots of three different subjects:
A girl in a coffin, a hot plate of soup, and a pretty woman lying in a couch. The footage of the actor was the same expressionless gaze. Yet the audience raved his performance, saying first he looked sad, then hungry, then lustful.
In a 1964 interview for the show Telescope, Alfred Hitchcock called this technique “pure cinematics – the assembly of film. Sir Hitchcock says that if a close-up shot of a man smiling is cut with a shot of a woman playing with a baby, the man is portrayed as 'kindly' and 'sympathetic' and if the same shot of the smiling man is cut with a girl in a bikini, the man is portrayed as 'dirty.'
These examples illustrate the power of editors as storytellers. The data gathered with the Kuleshove Experiment were heavily used by Russian filmmakers. This soon became an ordinary effect that affected how filmmakers shoot and edit their movies.
A girl in a coffin, a hot plate of soup, and a pretty woman lying in a couch. The footage of the actor was the same expressionless gaze. Yet the audience raved his performance, saying first he looked sad, then hungry, then lustful.
In a 1964 interview for the show Telescope, Alfred Hitchcock called this technique “pure cinematics – the assembly of film. Sir Hitchcock says that if a close-up shot of a man smiling is cut with a shot of a woman playing with a baby, the man is portrayed as 'kindly' and 'sympathetic' and if the same shot of the smiling man is cut with a girl in a bikini, the man is portrayed as 'dirty.'
These examples illustrate the power of editors as storytellers. The data gathered with the Kuleshove Experiment were heavily used by Russian filmmakers. This soon became an ordinary effect that affected how filmmakers shoot and edit their movies.
