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Kuleshov Effect
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The Kuleshov Effect is a well-documented concept in film-making, discovered by Soviet film editor Lev Kuleshov in the 1920s. Kuleshov put a film together, showing the expression of an actor, edited together with a plate of soup, a dead woman, and a woman on a recliner. Audiences praised the subtle acting, showing an almost imperceptible expression of hunger, grief, or lust in turn. The reality, of course, is that the same clip of the actor's face was re-used, and the effect is created entirely by its superimposition with other images. According to Kuleshov, this came into being largely by necessity. Soviet cinema in its early days was chronically cash-strapped. Kuleshov and other early directors trained themselves by reediting existing films, mostly movies produced in the Tsarist era. Kuleshov found that filmmakers could create an entirely new story by reordering scenes and shots, noticing this could in turn alter an audience's reaction. More generally, the Kuleshov Effect is the basis of Soviet montage cinema, and is used in many many films since. The idea is that by editing different things together, it is possible to create meanings that didn't exist in either of the original images—constructing 'sentences' and 'texts' out of film. Compare Rewatch Bonus, Acting in the Dark, Nothing Is Scarier. Contrast with Dull Surprise, which is more or less this trope's opposite. The Kuleshov Effect is about a single dull facial expression taking on deeper meanings based on context, whereas Dull Surprise is about a facial expression which should convey a deep meaning based on context but instead comes across as dull and meaningless. |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_36acc21e | type |
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Most films from the Soviet era prior to the forced implementation of "Soviet Realism" in cinema by Stalin. These include venerable classics like The Battleship Potemkin and Man with a Movie Camera. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_4305d39a | type |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_4305d39a | comment |
Hale County This Morning This Evening: The camera detours off the road onto a dirt path that leads to a stately old mansion, which no doubt once belonged to white slave-owning planters (the film is shot in majority-black Hale County, Alabama). There's a cut to some old silent film footage of a black comedian peering out from a field of tall grass. There's a shot of smoke obscuring the sun, from a tire fire in Real Life but obviously suggesting the plantation manor house burning. Then there's a shot of the silent film comedian smiling. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_8be2198d | type |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_8be2198d | comment |
One Le Chat comic has a drawing depicting The Cat's head nine time, each with the same deadpan face. But each head has a different emotion written under it which indicates what The Cat is really feeling on each which are: boredom, quietude, frankness, desire, contained anger, honesty, intense thinking, doubt and gluttony. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_8e68cca9 | type |
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Used frequently in Digger with the Statue of Ganesh, who contrives to be very expressive for a stone statue in much the same way as the Tom Strong example above. | |
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The famous shower scene from Psycho is often used as an example of this trope. After watching it, everyone immediately understands that Janet Leigh's character has been stabbed to death, but if you slow it down, only three frames actually show a knife piercing flesh (this is fast enough to count as subliminal messaging). The audience's understanding of what has taken place comes entirely from the way the images and sound are arranged, not from the actual content. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_9525e74d | comment |
In the Madness Combat episode that introduces Sanford, he only had two expressions: a normal default expression where he looks stoic, and an annoyed expression where he's frowning. However, when he sees Deimos's corpse, he goes from his annoyed expression to his default one, and the disappearance of his frown upon seeing his partner's corpse makes him look more surprised than stoic. Then he sees the Auditor and goes back to his annoyed expression, but the context makes him looks more angry than merely peeved. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_974da1ae | type |
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Rear Window extensively uses this trope to spend whole scenes switching back and forth between Jimmy Stewart and what he sees through his window. In one sequence he stares out his window as the focus of the scene switches between several of his neighbors who have very different emotions in their scenarios. His only reaction is to ultimately raise his glass to one of them. Scramble the different window scenes, and the tone changes greatly. Stewart actually complained that Alfred Hitchcock used the editing of the film in general to create a different performance than the one that was given. This was a common complaint of the actors: that Hitchcock wouldn't let them act. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_976efc02 | type |
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Mystery Science Theater 3000: Used in the "Mitchell" episode from season 5; the scene where Gypsy overhears the Mads' plan to kill their new intern Mike is a comical homage to the lip-reading scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Gypsy taking the place of Hal. And part of the joke is that even though she can hear what they're saying, she comes to the conclusion that it's Joel who's in danger. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_98670fed | type |
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Tom Strong makes it work in a comic book, with Pneuman, a robot who we're expressly told has the emotional capacity of a tea kettle, who still manages to communicate powerful emotion using a face with no moving parts, shown from the right angles in the right light. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_a57cf54d | comment |
Darths & Droids uses stills from Star Wars movies to tell a completely different, parodic story. Thus, acting that was originally meant to express pain or suffering turn into exhasperation - for instance, Leia's struggle to get free from Jabba's chain is presented as her "player's" annoyance at a pun. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_b3788a5d | comment |
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL "displays" a broad range of emotions through being an unreadable red camera lens. Famously, a scene of the crew trying to hold a conversation without HAL listening in intercuts shots of the camera lens and focusing on the mouths of the crew. Audiences were easily able to figure out that HAL was reading their lips. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_df870b3f | type |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_df870b3f | comment |
Arrival received praise for its mastery of this film technique. We assume that the opening scenes are flashbacks informing us of Hannah's death and that Louise is sleepwalking through life in a deep depression and trying to recover from it at the start of the proper narrative. She isn't; her daughter won't be born until after the events of the film. Louise has become Unstuck in Time and is experiencing those events exactly as we are, out of order. | |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_f8df4747 | type |
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| Kuleshov Effect / int_f8df4747 | comment |
The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye similarly does this with Whirl (and later Shockwave), very impressively since he's not only expressionless but faceless, too. Despite these limitations, under Alex Milne's pen, use of body language and careful posing still manages to make him one of the most expressive characters in the comic. | |
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