Kuleshov Effect

Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov demonstrated the montage effect in the 1910s and 1920s. Kuleshov edited together a short film of the expressionless face of Ivan Mosjoukine which was shown with shots of a plate of soup, a girl and a little girl's coffin. This film was then shown to an audience who believed  that his expression was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was looking at the soup, the girl or the coffin. The audience say his expression changed between hunger, desire or grief. However the footage of Mosjoukine was the shame shot repeated over and over again.

Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness of film editing. The implication is the view brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images. Kuleshov believed this, among with the montage theory, has to be the basis of cinema as an independent art form.

The montage experiments carried out be Kuleshov in the late 1910s formed the theoretical basis of Soviet montage cinema, culminating in the famous films of the late 1920s by directors such as Sergie Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, among other. These films included The battleship Potemkin, October, Mother, The End of St. Pertersburg, and The Man with a Movie Camera.