In the early 1900’s, a Russian filmmaker by the name of Lev Kuleshov came to the conclusion that two disparate shots edited one after the other are processed “together” in the minds of the audience. He conducted a test in which he showed an inexpressive shot of an actor along other images; a small child, a corpse, and food. The actor’s face remaind the same, but the audience tended to “see” different expressions in the same face. For example, many noted sorrow, desire or hunger in the expression of the actor. In fact, audience members later “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.” At the time, the experiment served to show the usefulness and power of film editing, demonstrating how the viewer tends to bring their own emotions to the edited sequence of images and attributing their reactions to the actors.

The Kuleshov Effect is well understood by modern cinematographers…a good example is how it was used skillfully by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey to inject emotion into the character HAL. Kubrick carefully played off the actors performances, lending the perception of deeper “acting” to the otherwise inanimate character. That’s just smart filmmaking. Watch Alfred Hitchcock give a simple example of the phenomenon below.

I imagine that editors must lean on this principle heavily when cutting together Steven Seagal films…his vast range of facial expression and emotion isn’t exactly world-reknown. But on a more serious note, nearly 100 years later the principle remains a useful tool for today’s editor. Where have you seen it used?