Kuleshov effect

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The Kuleshov effect is the editing film effect (montage) shown by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. This is a mental phenomenon in which viewers get more meaning from the interaction of two successive shots than from one shot separately.

Video Kuleshov effect

Specific

Kuleshov edited a short film in which the expressionless face image of the Tsarist show id Ivan Mosjoukine alternated with various other images (a plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a cot). The film is shown to viewers who believe that the expression on Mosjoukine's face is different every time she appears, depending on whether she "sees" the soup plate, the girl in the coffin, or the woman on the couch, showing an expression of hunger, sadness or desire,. Mosjoukine tape is actually the same shot every time. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to be the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about acting... the difficulty of his mood over the forgotten soup, touched and moved by the profound sadness by which he looked at the dead child, and took note of the passion she observed her, but we know that in all three cases the face is exactly the same. "

Kuleshov uses experiments to demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers bring their own emotional reactions to this image sequence, and then add those reactions to the actor, investing his expressionless face with their own feelings. Kuleshov believes this, along with the montage, should be the basis of cinema as an independent art form.

The effect has also been studied by psychologists, and is well known among modern filmmakers. Alfred Hitchcock refers to the effect in his conversation with FranÃƒÆ'Ã‚Â§ois Truffaut, using actor James Stewart as an example.

Hitchcock, in the famous "Definition of Happiness" interview, also explained in detail many types of editing. The final form, which he calls "pure editing", is described visually using Kuleshov effect. In the first version of the example, Hitchcock was squinting, and the audience saw a woman's tape with a baby. The screen then returns to Hitchcock's face, now smiling. Actually, he's a nice old man. In the second example, women and babies are replaced with women in bikinis, Hitchcock explains: "What is he now? He's a dirty old man."

The experiment itself was created by assembling fragments of existing films from the Tsar film industry, with no new material. Mosjoukine has become the "romantic" star of the prominent Tsar cinema, and is familiar to the audience.

Kuleshov pointed out the need to consider the montage as a basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov's view, the cinema consists of fragments and assemblies of the fragments, assembling elements that are in fact different. Therefore it is not the content of images in the important film, but their combination. The raw material of such artwork is not necessarily original, but it is a pre-fabrication element that artists can break down and reassemble into new juxtapositions.

The montage experiments conducted by Kuleshov in the late 1910s and early 1920s formed the theoretical basis of the Soviet montage cinema, culminating in famous films from the late 1920s by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, between other. These films include The Battleship Potemkin , October , Mother , End of St. Petersburg , and The Man with Movie Camera .

Maps Kuleshov effect

Research

The Kuleshov effect has only been studied by psychologists in recent years. Prince and Hensley (1992) redesigned the original study design but found no alleged effects. The study had 137 participants but was a single experimental trial, susceptible to noise in the data. Mobbs et al. (2006) conducted fMRI studies in the subject and found effects for negative, positive, or neutral valences. When a neutral face is shown behind a sad scene, it looks sad, when it is shown behind the happy scene it looks happy. Recently, Barratt, RÃƒÆ'Ã‚ Â© dei, Innes-Ker, and van de Weijer (2016) tested 36 participants using 24 film sequences in five emotional states (happiness, sadness, hunger, fear, and desire) and neutral control conditions. Again, they were able to show that the neutral face was judged according to the stimulating material, confirming Mobbs et al. (2006) findings.

Thus, despite initial problems in testing Kuleshov's effects experimentally, researchers now agree that the context in which faces are shown has a significant effect on how the face is perceived.

To find out if Kuleshov's effects can also be induced auditorally, Baranowski and Hecht interrupt various face clips with neutral scenes, featuring happy music, sad music, or no music at all. They found that music significantly affected the participants' emotional assessment of facial expressions.