The Kuleshov Experiment Revisited: Illustrated and Persistence of Vision Revisited

THE KULESHOV EXPERIMENT Revisited

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During the early Soviet era, the Russian filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov  experimented with film language. This kind of experimentation was convenient especially at a time when film stock was rare and expensive. So it was useful to edit the films of others in different ways to convey different meanings.
    One of these experiments, the famous "Kuleshov Experiment," is dismissed by some as more myth than reality. But in principle rather than fact, the experiment is useful to consider.
    Kuleshov is said to have used a film shot of a man's face, supposedly neutral in emotion, then edited that shot three different ways, with three different followup shots.
    One edit showed the man's face followed by a dead body. Another followed the man's face with a bowl of soup. Another followed with a shot of a baby.
    Each time, viewers would praise the acting of the man for perfectly showing grief, hunger, and joy.
    This is the basis of intellectual montage—creating a new idea out of two images. In fact, another Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein, compared film montage to the Chinese ideogram, which combines two images (ideas) to express an entirely different third idea that is more than the sum of the two images.
    Eisenstein gives the following examples:

    a dog + a mouth = "to bark";
    a mouth + a child = "to scream";
    a mouth + a bird = "to sing";
    a knife + a heart = "sorrow," and so on.

    This editing principle is not limited to intellectual montage, but is the basis of all film language. An entire film, Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953), was built on this principle of showing the feelings of an actor (James Stewart) mainly through what he (and we) see him viewing at the time.
    Students are asked to "interpret" the emotion on the man's face (a simple line drawing) in all three animated gif files I made up for this purpose. One series (with a bowl of soup) should seem to express hunger, the second (with a gravestone) grief, the third (with a woman) desire.
    At the same time, consider again the matter of persistence of vision. Nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge wished to settle a bet over whether a  horse keeps all four legs off the ground at one moment. The assumption was the racing horse always keeps one leg on the ground. Muybridge proved that for at least a moment, all four legs of a racing horse are off the ground (see above photo series).
    To photograph this action, Muybridge lined up twenty cameras with wires that would trigger a shot from each camera in sequence as the horse raced past. These sequential photos (c. 1877) were then published, along with dozens of other action studies.
    The modern camera does the same thing, within a single filmstrip, instead of using twenty cameras, and at a much faster rate of speed (24 shots per second, called fps, or "frames per second").
    I've illustrated how Muybridge's photos would look looped as in a screen projection. I cut up the photographs and arranged them sequentially in a slide show format (above, right); by this means the student can observe the effect of the persistence of vision.

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