The Kuleshov Effect
How a cinematic experiment led to a fundamental element of cinematic language.
The Myth
At some point every acting teacher quotes the oft-told story of Rouben Mamoulian’s note to Greta Garbo as they were setting up for the final close-up at the end of QUEEN CHRISTINA – ‘Just think of nothing, my dear.’
Whether this story is true, or just apocryphal, using my terms, Mamoulian and Garbo were creating INSIGHT through PROJECTION. Because the audience has lived through the Queen’s story up to now, and they are heavily invested in her journey and her feelings, when Mamoulian and Garbo offer them a blank space, they rush in to fill it – with their own feelings.
Each audience member thinks that they are seeing deeply into Garbo, when instead Garbo is providing a mirror for them to see deeply into themselves.
Kuleshov’s Experiment
This tendency for audience members to supply the appropriate emotions to a situation when they are denied an empathetic relationship is a fundamental part of the language of cinema. It was first identified in a celebrated film experiment conducted by Russian film director and theorist Lev Kuleshov, publicised by Pudovkin, and known henceforth as ‘The Kuleshov Effect.’
Kuleshov conducted his famous experiment in the 1920s. There are various versions of the story, and the original footage is long gone. Here is my apocryphal version. I may have enhanced it slightly.
Kuleshov took a ‘found’ shot of Russian matinée idol Ivan Mozzhukhin doing a wardrobe test.
‘Stand there, please. In the light. Look down. Roll camera. Look up. Look towards the camera. Hold it. Look away. Cut. Thanks.’
Then he intercut found shots of a bowl of food, a child playing in the street, and an old woman in a coffin into the middle of the shot of Mozzhukhin – right after he looks to the camera.
Then he showed the result to a number of audiences, and reported that the audiences commented on the quality and subtlety of Mozzhukhin’s performance – the hunger he showed when he ‘looked’ at the bowl of food; the sorrow he felt at the death of his mother; the joy he felt watching his children play. And Mozzhukhin was not by any means a ‘small’ actor – even by the silent film standards of the time.
But, because Mozzhukhin’s reaction was withheld and unspecific, the audience placed their own interpretation on the narrative (‘his’ dead mother, ‘his’ children etc), and then projected their own feelings into the empty space created by his unspecific reaction.
This effect became known as the Kuleshov Effect and was later absorbed into general film language as the ‘Point of View Sandwich,’ sometimes also called a ‘Suture Edit.’
The POV sandwich and its variations are crucial tools in cinematic language for creating subjective identification with a character.
