The Kuleshov Effect

Mirko · **Posted:** October 13th, 2004, 1:54 pm

Hi everybody,

I've been meaning to post this for some time. There has been discussion of several techniques to use facial expressions for minifigs. Although I find Jay's Rapunzel quite convincing, I fear that it will be be very time consuming to do a longer film like that (and as a beginning brickfilmer, I'm still far away from animating "efficiently"). Whether facial expressions are a blessing or a curse is probably a matter of opinion, but I think there are more ways to be exploited in the field of a minifig's emotions, even if the facial expressions become state-of-the-art one day.

I've read a (admittedly only pocket sized) book on film history. It mentions the Kuleshov effect, which seems quite relevant to the art of brickfilming. Here is just some food for thought, maybe we can come up with ideas how to use this effect more specificly and goal-oriented in brickfilms.

Lev Kuleshov was an early (1920s) soviet filmmaker who experimented with montage in movies. He took a single shot of an actor showing no expression and intermitted it with shots of a dead woman, a dish of soup and a playing girl. The viewers of the film praised the actor's ability to convincingly express emotions, while in fact he didn't express anything at all (he was told just to sit there and be filmed). The conclusion is that the montage suggests emotions to the viewer even if they are not shown explicitly by the actors (the viewer projects his own emotions onto the actors). The following article relates this experiment to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey:

http://www.ambiguous.org/robin/word/kuleshov.html

Mirko

BertL · **Posted:** October 13th, 2004, 1:57 pm

Yes, I've experimented with that too. I just put a face of myself, and then cucumbersalad.

There were many people who thought I was looking at the cucumbersalad full of "eugh" on my face. (Sorry, I forgot the word)

PE-porukka · **Posted:** October 13th, 2004, 3:56 pm

http://www.ambiguous.org/robin/word/kuleshov.html wrote:

When we are shown no explicit emotion, we infer it[...]We don't know HAL is frightened because he sounds frightened. We know he's frightened because Dave is coming to kill him. His blank voice forces us to experience his situation in his name and feel his own fear for him. We are one step closer to the action on screen, not reacting to the actors but reacting with the characters.

I think this example of the Kuleshov Effect and the clever use of montage shows that a talented film-maker can bring characters to life without using facial expressions or relying on voiceacting even. The viewer reacts to the action.

LowweeK · **Posted:** October 14th, 2004, 4:32 am

A very wise lecture that many pro editors and directors should read again...

How many of them do movies like video clips with cuts not exceeding 3s.
Last example ? "Catwoman".

The Kuleshov Effect

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