The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classic Experiment

Open any film textbook, and you will find discussions of the effect, deriving from the series of editing experiments conducted by Lev Kuleshov in the late teens and early 1920s.l One experiment in particular-with the actor Mozhukin, child, soup, and coffin-is perhaps the classic piece of film research, customarily cited in discussions of editing and montage aesthetics as proof that cinematic meaning is a function of the ordering of shots. Students reading these texts in introductory film courses may often encounter the Kuleshov experiment and its reported results as empirical facts. The effect is often written about as if its factual status has really been documented and is uncontested. A representative citation is the following: [Kuleshov] intercut a perfectly neutral closeup of an actor with a shot of a plate of soup; then the same close up with a dead woman in a coffin; then with a little girl playing with a doll. Audiences raved about the actor's sensitive projection of hunger, grief, and paternal joy, his subtle shifts of emotion depending on what he was looking at. Kuleshov proved that the order of shots in a sequence influenced the perception and meaning of any given action.2 It will be the suggestion of this essay that nothing of the kind has really been proven in the usual scientific sense. As Norman Holland and others have noted, the experiment has passed into the mythology of film.3 Kuleshov's experiments are surrounded with questions of fact and procedure that make his work difficult to evaluate and that cast some doubt on his conclusions. The footage Kuleshov used is now lost, and accounts about the famous experiment with Mozhukin are contradictory. According to Pudovkin, the Mozhukin footage included a shot of a woman in a coffin. In another context, Kuleshov indicated it was a naked woman on a couch.4 Despite such problems, however, the Kuleshov experiments are repeatedly cited and acknowledged by the introductory texts in our field, where they are disseminated to succeeding generations of novice students. This being the case, a critical examination of the Kuleshov legacy may be in order, the better to disentangle the components of speculative theory and empirical observation operative inside his research paradigm. The goal here is to provide a clearer contextualization of Kuleshov's work, distinguishing between