Lev Kuleshov

It's, it, it's...

If you want a film studies version of this, it's the way that they teach the, the, the Kuleshov effect, right, of-

Yeah

... you, you sort of, uh, you know, as a theory of montage-

The director was trying to be very coy and, and subtle with the meaning of this film that meant a lot to Rachel, enough to make her cry and die?

You know, they s- they do something interesting with the Kuleshov effect, where they record the faces of, uh, Greg and Earl and her mother.

And then they cut to, um, the video of her taking off her-

Mm

Mm-hmm.

When people tell her she looks beautiful, um, she can't believe them because she sees herself in the mirror and she, all she sees is, uh, her wasting away.

And so, um, I'm sure that that instance of the Kuleshov effect...

And for those of you that don't know in the audience, the Kuleshov effect is where you have, um- Two clips, two, um, images that on their own mean, like, independent things.

Correct, and that is the genius of it.

The terror relies on a psychological phenomenon related to the Kuleshov effect and persistence of vision.

In the shower scene, Hitchcock utilizes editing as an act of physical violence.

Oh, wow.

I am?

At some point in the 19- teens, a Soviet editor and theorist named Lev Kuleshov performed an experiment.

He spliced together a shot of a man's blank face with various other images, maybe a bowl of soup, maybe a, a dead body.

Audiences were asked to describe the actor's expression, and Kuleshov discovered that viewers read emotions into the blank face depending on whatever it was juxtaposed with.

The man seemed hungry if the shot was cut with the bowl of soup.

He seemed sad if he was seemingly looking at a dead body.

This idea that combinations of images can create combinations of ideas became known as the Kuleshov effect, and it became a foundational concept in early filmmaking and in the development of montage editing.

Now, about 20 years later, psychologists at Harvard University, including a man named Henry Murray, invented something called the Thematic Apperception Test.

It's wonderful.

It's kind of like, what was it? The Kuleshov effect or whatever, where you're watching her watch her husband do his crossword puzzle while she's thinking all these thoughts.

Yeah.

And it makes me feel differently about the shots of him.

My local cinema, the magnificent Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford, is showing 1926 Japanese psychological horror A Page of Madness with a live score by Hugo Max, and that's on Wednesday the 7th of October.

This also seems like an opportune moment to trail the fact that the subject of the next regular episode of this show will be Lev Kuleshov's startling 1926 Gothic Western, By the Law.

I don't have a release date for that yet, not least because I haven't recorded it.

But I am scheduled to do that in October.

We make patterns in our brains, the way we stayed safe as cavemen and the way we make sense of the world as it is today.

One clear expression of this was the Kuleshov experiment.

Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker in the early 20th century who found this still photo of an actor here.

that he used to make an experiment with how an audience would see images make sense.

He showed the picture of the man, and then a bowl of soup, and then the man again.