Kuleshov Effect

In the Moscow film school around 1920, Kuleshov intercut one expressionless close-up of the actor Ivan Mosjoukine with a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin and a woman on a divan. By Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1929 account, audiences praised the actor's hunger, grief and desire, though the face was the same shot each time. The footage does not survive, and Kuleshov's and Pudovkin's descriptions of it differ in detail.

In practice

• A reaction shot of a juror filmed on a slow afternoon is cut after the defendant's confession and reads as horror.
• A politician's neutral expression in a news package looks smug or stricken depending on the clip the editor places before it.

Possible explanations

The usual explanation is that faces are ambiguous and viewers resolve them from context: the preceding shot sets up an expectation of what the person is looking at and feeling, and the face is read to fit it. Hitchcock demonstrated the same principle on television, turning a smiling old man from kindly to lecherous by changing the shot he was looking at.

In its favour

A within-subject fMRI study by Dean Mobbs and colleagues in 2006 found neutral faces rated as sadder, happier or more fearful to match the preceding scene, and a 2016 study by Daniel Barratt and colleagues found the same across five emotions. Later work has extended it to music and to still photographs.

Against it

A 1992 recreation by Stephen Prince and Wayne Hensley, with 137 viewers watching a single sequence, found no effect, and later studies find it stronger for some emotions, such as fear, than for others. Film historians also note that the original experiment is known only from later and inconsistent retellings.

Standing

The perceptual counterpart of the Framing Effect. Compare Creative Geography, Kuleshov's other demonstration, and the Body-Context Effect.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Subject

Communication & Media

Essay

What happens to a message after it is sent