Thinking about Filmįilm historian Ronald Levaco called Kuleshov the “first aesthetic theorist of cinema,” a deserved appellation. What Kuleshov was witnessing was the dissolution of a paradigm-which no doubt felt like the melting away of the thing itself. This turned out to be false or, rather, true in a limited sense.
#Silent montage meaning free#
Such authority over meaning strikes us as obvious today, but at the time the “photographic” image was held to be a totally faithful, “concrete,” inviolably “true” artifact, free of the shortcomings of subjectivity. What stunned Kuleshov was the incredible flexibility of the medium, and, with that in mind, the power it granted him to provide moving pictures with new contextual meanings. Yet Kuleshov was right to emphasize the power that editing has over motion pictures, even to the point of bending the inner “reality” of shots. How successful would the Mozzhukhin experiment have been had he not appeared “neutral” but enraged, elated, or better yet, jogging in place? These montage composites are limited by plausibility (a woman has lips, legs, a back, and eyes) and the content of the shots themselves (neutral stares versus, say, directed actions, like, ‘appear as if you are frightened’).
What Kuleshov actually discovered and what he thought he discovered are not necessarily one and the same.
This interplay between montage, perception, and meaning has come to be known as the “Kuleshov Effect.” Kuleshov tended to exaggerate the implications of these constructs: “it was not important how the shots were taken, but how these shots were assembled.” Alfred Hitchcock, decades apart and worlds away, called it “pure cinema,” when the montage gives rise to meanings that exist nowhere to the eye, but only in the mind. He writes, “By montage alone we were able to depict the girl, just as in nature, because we shot the lips of one woman, the legs of another, the back of a third, and the eyes of a fourth.” It was “a totally new person.” And even though she was a composite, according to Kuleshov, she retained “the complete reality of the material.” In Art of the Cinema, Kuleshov’s first book, he tells of several other tests, including the creation of a single woman from a hodgepodge of different women. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the Soviet silent era, its “golden era,” was the flowering of a shared fascination with Kuleshov’s discovery. Soviet greats of the silent era, such as Vsevelod Pudovkin, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei M. “The discovery stunned me,” Kuleshov wrote, “so convinced was I of the enormous power of montage.” The Power of MontageĪnd his amazement was catching. When staring at the soup, Mozzhukhin was hungry at the young woman, lustful at the child, mournful. When he showed the segments to audiences and polled their reactions, they swore that Mozzhukhin’s expression had changed from piece to piece. Then he intercut each practically-identical segment with three other shots-a bowl of steaming soup, an attractive young woman, and a child lying dead in a coffin. Taking an expressionless long shot of the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin peering into the camera-presumably, because footage of the original experiment has been lost- he broke it into three parts. The hypothesis: the dramatic effect of a film was found not in the content of its shots but rather in the edits that join them together. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), political partisan, teacher-ventured a hypothesis. It was in 1918 that Lev Kuleshov-film theorist, father of the Soviet Montage school of cinema, director of The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.
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