Wiki Definition
Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings. Kuleshov believed this,along with montage, had to be the basis of cinema as an independent art form.
The effect has also been studied by psychologists, and is well-known among modern film makers. Alfred Hitchcock refers to the effect in his conversations with François Truffaut, using actor James Stewart as the example. [3]
The experiment itself was created by assembling fragments of pre-existing film from the Tsarist film industry, with no new material. Mosjoukine had been the leading romantic "star" of Tsarist cinema, and familiar to the audience.
Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov's view, the cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination. The raw materials of such an art work need not be original, but are pre-fabricated elements which can be disassembled and re-assembled by the artist into new juxtapositions.
The montage experiments carried out by Kuleshov in the late 1910s and early 1920s formed the theoretical basis of Soviet montage cinema, culminating in the famous films of the late 1920s by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, among others. These films included The Battleship Potemkin, October, Mother, The End of St. Petersburg, and The Man with a Movie Camera.
Soviet montage cinema was suppressed under Joseph Stalin during the 1930s as a dangerous example of Formalism in the arts, and as being incompatible with the official Soviet artistic doctrine of Socialist Realism.
Watch this video (yes it is in French but there are subtitles when necessary). It is interesting when considering how different shots constructed through choices in media language (editing) construct different meanings. The image of the man is the same each time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=4gLBXikghE0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc&playnext=1&list=PLFAD5495B002ED52C
Hitchcock describing the Kuleshov Effect
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCAE0t6KwJY
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