One of the primary innovations that arose from these questions was Soviet montage, an early investigation into the way that images and cinematic moments, strung and layered together, created new meaning. Throughout the early 1920s, Soviet filmmakers experimented with editing to showcase how complex ideas could be extracted from the combinations of footage shown. This was a cinematic investigation that was highly theoretical and innovative at the time, wherein previously editing had been used to convey a sense of spatio-temporal continuity between shots. This development of Soviet montage, both as a theory and a practice, was a moment in cinema’s history that expanded the possibility and profundity of the filmic medium.
The Kuleshov Effect
Lev Kuleshov was one of the founders of the 1919 All Union State Institute of Cinematography and has since become a crucial theoretician of Soviet montage. Both a filmmaker and a teacher, Kuleshov shared the formalist concern for editing; the way that layered shots interact and juxtapose to create certain impacts. “The secret mastery over cinematic material”, Kuleshov wrote, “- the essence of cinematography – lies in its composition, the alternation of photographed pieces” (Kuleshov on Film, 1922 [2018])
The formalist’s task was to find a scientific way to understand more about film techniques and their effect. In looking at two pieces of footage, strung together, the formalists agreed there were three components at work: the first shot, the second shot, and then the connections and inferences we make as a result. This third component, although immaterial, was always present and of the utmost importance to the formalists.
Kuleshov crystalized this idea in a highly influential filmic experiment called “the Kuleshov effect”. He took a single shot of the expressionless face of Russian silent film actor, Ivan Mosjoukine, and showed it with three different reverse shots. The original footage of the experiment can be watched here:
