The Kuleshov effect
Watch each sequence: a face, an image, then the face again. Say what the man is feeling.
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Try the experiment: your result will appear here, next to what most people do.
What just happened (read it after the experiment)
What most people do: In modern replications, the same face is judged sadder, hungrier or happier depending on the image that comes before it.
The face was exactly the same all three times. The emotion you read in it came from the image placed just before.
Around 1920, the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov cut a close-up of an actor, Ivan Mozzhukhin, with a bowl of soup, a coffin or a little girl. Audiences admired the subtlety of his acting: hunger, grief, tenderness.
The original film is lost, and modern replications find an effect that is real but more modest than the legend. Hitchcock nonetheless saw it as the foundation of cinema: the meaning of a shot depends on the one before it.
More experiments
Sources
- Daniel Barratt et al., “Does the Kuleshov effect really exist?,” i-Perception, 2016.