Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Kuleshov Effect

Concerning emotional resonance in cinema the Kuleshov Effect is an important concept. It rests on the theory of montage and the effect that film editing has on evoking emotions from a viewer. It is not simply the content of a scene or the expression on the character's face, but the way in which images are cut together that can induce a feeling from the audience.

His original experiment used shots of the face of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin, in which the actor's expression did not change. Edited next to shots of different items he appeared to be 'looking at', (a bowl of soup, a girl and a coffin) the emotion
the character was feeling was interpreted in terms of hunger, desire or grief. Although I was not able to find any original photos from the Kuleshov experiment, here is an example of this effect found on You Tube:



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4 comments:

Deborah said...

Hey Diana,

This is really interesting, and there's a lot of potential here for further research. I think it provokes much thought around the ethics of filmmaking, and questions whether or not there is such a thing as truth in film (cross-over with the documentary discussion).

As Dave says with his Rob Zombie post, "the final scene is shot in such a way that most viewers end up being tricked in to feeling sorry and rooting for the murderers."

Do filmmakers have to keep pushing and grossing us out or offending us in order to resonate emotionally?
I wonder, can filmmakers go to far in the name of entertainment?

Great video clip.

Anonymous said...

You said "Although I was not able to find any original photos from the Kuleshov experiment...". You may be interested to know that Kuleshov himself told an intervewer in 1965 that the images from his 'Mozzhukhin experiment' were discarded and therefore no longer exist: "Unhappily no stills or notes have been preserved. The pictures that have been published abroad, as for instance in an issue of 'Cinema pratique' in 1962, are not mine at all. Mine were not kept." ('Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film', eds. Luda & Jean Schnitzer and Marcel Martin, Secker & Warburg, 1973, p.70). You can therefore stop looking; they don't exist to be found.

The modern version of the Kuleshov Effect was interesting, but seemed to deal more with revealing our expectations of the way a film is constructed according to continuity editing than with the spectator's projection of emotion onto the actor's blank face.

Paul Bernhardt said...

i searched the web with some diligence and i believe this to be the clearest visual explanation of the kuleshov effect:
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