Kuleshov may well be the very first film theorist. He helped to establish the world’s first film school in Moscow. For Kuleshov, the essence of the cinema was editing, the juxtaposition of one shot with another. To illustrate this principle, he created what has come to be known as the “Kuleshov Experiments” that explore how juxtaposition and sequence create meaning.

Kuleshov Experiments

There are three types of experiments that are important to us:

Re-created SpaceConstructed FigureConstructed Meaning

Kuleshov Experiments

Re-created Space

A single dramatic line is used to bring radically separate places and locals into close proximity to one another. Scenes were shot throughout Moscow, Leningrad and the surrounding countryside. These were edited together to create the impression that these sites were within blocks of each other. Today, the radical nature of this discovery is almost lost on us, numbed as we are to the irony of what the phrase “shot on location” has come to mean.

Kuleshov Experiments

Re-created Space

In contemporary films, India is often presented to us as the jungles of Africa. New Zealand offers more believable moors then those of Ireland, and Montreal regularly functions as an ersatz New York. As a rule, cinematic geographies are cobbled together from multiple sources, real and imagined.

Kuleshov Experiments

Constructed Figure

By 1925, Kuleshov and his students at the were prepared perform on humanity the same movie magic that they had brought to geography by conjuring a vivacious primping beauty from a canful of celluloid.

In 1965, at the age of 70 Kuleshov recalled the event as follows…

Kuleshov Experiments

Constructed Figure

“I shot a scene of a woman at her toilet: she did her hair, made up, put on her stockings and her shoes and dress… I filmed the hair, the hands, the legs, the feet of different women, but I edited them as if it were all one woman, and, thanks to montage, I succeeded in creating a woman who did not exist in reality, but only in cinema. Hardly anyone has written about this last experiment. I kept the montage for a long time, until it was lost during the war.”

Kuleshov Experiments

Constructed Figure

The closest contemporary parallel to what Kuleshov was doing with film can only be found in the synthetic cubism of Braque or Picasso. They also assembled multiple views of a scene together into a single unified vision. The viewer of these paintings was challenged to reconstruct the original subject from the fragments, a process that most viewers found difficult, unfamiliar and decidedly unreal.

Kuleshov Experiments

Constructed Figure

But Kuleshov, using a similar technique in film, was able to construct a vision that also demanded the participation of the viewer to piece together a fragmented subject, but here there was no difficulty . The viewer was left with an image of a figure or a landscape that seemed comfortable & to conform to their experiences of such things, appearing as a natural representation as opposed to the unreal and abstract one that it actually was.

Kuleshov Experiments

1. An actor plays a body double, with a blue hood to take out the head for computer substitution.

2. A "dead head" computer model is put in to simulate movement.

3. Brad then acts in the facial details. 4. Lighting, hairs, eyes, tongue and such facial details are

added for the finished movie version.

Constructed Meaning

The blank face of the actor Mosjoukin was captured on a few seconds of film. In the darkroom this short scene was duplicated many times over, and then spliced together with other fragments of film: a bowl of soup, a prison gate, a child’s coffin and the like, to create several mini movies that were then screened before unsuspecting audiences. Afterward, audience members were asked to describe what they had just seen.

Kuleshov Experiments

Constructed Meaning

The blank face of the actor Mosjoukin was captured on a few seconds of film. In the darkroom this short scene was duplicated many times over, and then spliced together with other fragments of film: a bowl of soup, a prison gate, a child’s coffin and the like, to create several mini movies that were then screened before unsuspecting audiences. Afterward, audience members were asked to describe what they had just seen.

Kuleshov Experiments

Constructed Meaning

Rather than replying with the facts:

a man’s face followed by a bowl of soup, Viewers claimed to have witnessed hunger, or referencing the prison gate and the baby coffin, they spoke of longing, or anger or grief. All of these emotions were ascribed exact same facial expression. Misjoukin neither felt nor acted out these emotions. It was the viewer who experienced, or at least identified them.

Kuleshov Experiments

Hitchcock Loves Bikinis

Kuleshov Experiments

Kuleshov’s student Sergei Eisenstein termed this “the third meaning” and used a simple formula to describe this property of montage:

A + B = C

Where the product of “A”, the meaning of scene1, and “B”, the meaning of scene 2 result in “C” an entirely new meaning.

Kuleshov Experiments

Another perhaps more accurate and visual way to formulate this “montage math” is:

1 + 2 = 12

Where “1”, the meaning of scene 1, and “2”, the meaning of scene 2. They also result in

“12” an entirely new meaning, but “12” is just a “1” next to a “2” so the result is not JUST the new meaning it is the new meaning plus all of

the old ones

Kuleshov Experiments

Meaning is not singular and stable.

Meaning is created by the gestalt principles of similarity, closure and continuity.

Artworks are meaning making machines.