Soviet Montage, a non-linear film editing style which began in the early 1900s, spliced different film shots together in unique ways to create meaning. Also deemed "intellectual montage," this editing technique forced the viewer to construct meaning from the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated images. Singular shots did not hold meaning in and of themselves, but only in comparison to other shots. The viewer was not a passive viewer, who simply marveled at the spectacle, but was an active participant in creating the meaning of the work.
Lev Kuleshov created this experimental film, titled The Kuleshov Effect, in the early days of Soviet montage. The film demonstrates how viewers impose meaning onto the images they see.
Shot A is a neutral actor's face.
Shot B is soup.
Shot C is the same actor's face.
The audience believed that the actor's expression had changed after seeing the soup. The actor is now hungry, they believed. The hunger, it seemed, became evident in his facial expression. However, it is the exact same shot as Shot A. The audience imposed the state of hunger on the actor's face based on the juxtaposition of the actor's face with the soup.
Kuleshov repeated the experiment several times. In the film I've posted, the other "B" shots are of a dead child and of a scantily clad woman. The audience believed that the actor's face had changed after he "saw" the child or the woman. And the audience also believed that the actor's face was distinctly different from when he saw the soup, the child and the woman.
Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
The Kuleshov Effect demonstrates how we as viewers must be aware of how we construct meaning from raw material and impose our own values, desires, thoughts, emotions on that which we experience.
