What experiment did Kuleshov do? What did he find out?
Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mosjoukine's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl in the coffin, or the woman on the divan, showing an expression of hunger, grief or desire, respectively. The footage of Mosjoukine was actually the same shot each time. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about the acting... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Effect accessed: 16/12/2013
Other sources of research:
The Kuleshov effect takes its name from Lev Kuleshov, an influential filmmaker in the mid-twentieth century Soviet Union, who illustrated it. It's a little hard to pin down precisely what the nature of his experiment was. According to Ronald Levaco, Kuleshov shot a single long closeup of an actor named Mozhukhin, sitting still without expression. He then intercut it with various shots, the exact content of which he forgot in his later years, but which, according to his associate Vsevolod Pudovkin, comprised a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a child with a toy bear. The audience "marveled at the sensitivity of the actor's range."
Kuleshov's own account, though, describes only two scenes: one in which a jailed man is shown an open cell door, and one in which a starving man is shown a bowl of soup. Kuleshov switched the shots, so that the starving man saw the open door and the prisoner looked at soup, and there was no noticeable difference.
Whether the latter account is a product of Kuleshov's forgetfulness or not, the thrust of the experiment is the same. At that time in his career, Kuleshov held very strong views on editing. The montage of a film, he felt, overrode all other aspects of film making, making them irrelevant. He came to call his actors "models," indicating the lack of significance he attributed them. The "Kuleshov effect," though, refers to the more probable experiment, the former.
The essence of the Kuleshov effect is filling in the blanks, or connecting the dots. Mozhukhin isn't actually looking at anything; he probably doesn't even know what they'll make him look at, so he can't possibly be reacting to it. He expresses no emotion, so an audience cannot possibly see emotion on his face, but the audience does. The viewer is presented with a situation or environment along with the academic fact that someone is experiencing it. He cannot simply accept the actor's evident emotion, as none is given, so he decides what the appropriate response would be and assigns it to the actor.
"When we are shown no explicit emotion, we infer it--but in order to do that, we are forced to experience the circumstances, to think and to feel the emotion ourselves. This is why the Kuleshov effect can generate such a strong reaction."
http://kubrickfilms.tripod.com/id21.html accessed: 16/12/2013
Now here's the real magic of it. The viewer doesn't realize the reaction is in his own mind. He assumes the actor shows it, but he can't see just how, so it seems like an almost magical projection of feeling by a brilliant actor. The viewer admires the actor's subtlety, and at the same time is more strongly affected by the scene. The character seems stoic, which at once impresses the viewer and lends weight to the emotion he does seem to display. In addition, the viewer wonders if others in the audience have caught the undercurrent, patting himself on the back for being so insightful. Backward as it may seem, the emotion of the scene is heightened in several different ways precisely because it is not being expressed at all.
http://kubrickfilms.tripod.com/id21.html accessed: 16/12/2013
