4.3.2: Soviet Montage And The Kuleshov Effect

The storytelling power of the medium.

As you may recall, the earliest motion pictures were often single-take actualités, unedited views of a man sneezing, workers leaving a factory, or a train pulling into a station. It took a few years before filmmakers understood the storytelling power of the medium before they realized there was such a thing as cinematic language. Filmmakers like Georges Melies seemed to catch on quickly, not only using mise-en-scène and in-camera special effects but also employing the edit, the joining together of discrete shots in a sequence to tell a story. However, it was the Russians, in this early period, that focused specifically on editing as the essence of cinema. And one Russian in particular, Lev Kuleshov.

Lev Kuleshov was an art school dropout living in Moscow when he directed his first film in 1917. He was only 18 years old. By the time he was 20, he had helped found one of the first film schools in the world in Moscow. He was keenly interested in film theory, more specifically, film editing and how it worked on an audience. He had a hunch that the power of cinema was not found in any one shot but in the juxtaposition of shots. So, he performed an experiment. He cut together a short film and showed it to audiences in 1918. Here’s the film:

After viewing the film, the audience raved about the actor and his performance (he was a very famous actor in Russia at the time). They praised the subtly with which he expressed his aching hunger upon viewing the soup, the mournful sadness upon seeing the child in a coffin, and the longing desire upon seeing the scantily clad woman. The only problem? It was the exact same shot of the actor every time! The audience was projecting their own emotion and meaning onto the actor’s expression because of the juxtaposition of the other images. This phenomenon – how we derive more meaning from the juxtaposition of two shots than from any single shot in isolation – became known as The Kuleshov Effect.

Other Russian filmmakers took up this fascination with how editing works on an audience, both emotionally and psychologically, and developed an approach to filmmaking known as the Soviet Montage Movement. Montage is simply the French term for “assembly” or “editing” (even the Russians had to borrow words from the French!), but Russian filmmakers of the 1920s were pushing the boundaries of what was possible, testing the limits of the Kuleshov Effect. And in the process, they were accelerating the evolution of cinematic language, bringing a sophisticated complexity to how cinema communicates meaning.

The most famous of these early proponents of the Soviet Montage Movement was Sergei Eisenstein. Once a student of Kuleshov’s (though actually a year older), Eisenstein would become one of the most prolific members of the movement. Perhaps his most well-known film, Battleship Potemkin (1925), contains a sequence that has become one of the most famous examples of Soviet montage and, frankly, one of the most famous sequences in the cinema period. It’s known as The Odessa Steps Sequence. You may remember it from Chapter One. Let’s take another look:

One thing you might notice about that sequence is that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, at least in terms of a logical narrative. However, Eisenstein was more interested in creating an emotional effect. And he does it by juxtaposing images of violence with images of innocence, repeating images and shots, lingering on some images, and flashing on others. He wants you to feel the terror of those peasants being massacred by the troops, even if you don’t completely understand the geography or linear sequence of events. That’s the power of the montage as Eisenstein used it: A collage of moving images designed to create an emotional effect rather than a logical narrative sequence.