If you stand silently and expressionlessly, people project their own thoughts and feelings on to you. If you do that at a funeral, people might think you are sad. If you do it in a restaurant, people might think you are hungry.

This principle of projection is exploited in feature films and is named “The Kuleshov Effect” after Lev Kuleshov who first experimented with it in Soviet Russia in 1918. If you show an image of a man’s face followed by an image of a bowl of soup, the audience assumes that the man is looking at the bowl of soup. If you show the same image of the man’s face followed by different images -  a pretty woman, a corpse, a painting - the audience assumes that the man is looking at those things.  But that isn’t all: they also think his expression has changed because the different objects chosen by the film-makers cause different thoughts and resonances in the mind of the viewer.

Kuleshov’s remarkable discovery was first cinematically exploited by Sergei Eisenstein’s montage techniques, as in the films Strike and Battleship Potemkin, but they are an absolute mainstay of almost any filmed work now. Every time you get a shot of Inspector Morse‘s blank face, The Kuleshov Effect is being exploited. It is part of the basic language of cinema; the key is what was shown before and what is shown afterwards. The human mind links images that are shown in succession and so the choice of succession of images can be used to direct (or even manipulate) the viewers mind and so tell a story, without words.

True cinematic art is poetry with images. Image after image in a carefully chosen sequence that have a cumulative effect on the viewer. It’s no surprise that the supreme cinematic artist Andrei Tarkovsky combined actual poetry (often written by his father) with his images for even greater effect. His film Mirror works on a different level to most films. It is a selection of his own personal memories that also have an effect on the viewer. Tarkovsky said “This is a film about you”. He made a film about everyone by making a film about himself and his own memories. It is deeply personal and simultaneously about each and every one of us. The film reflects our own thoughts back at us. We use our own past to interpret his past

The art of the Film-maker is to choose the right sequence of images that tell their story, to communicate to the viewer the emotions and details they want to convey. There are some who believe that this art was diminished when sound films came along, because words could be used to tell the story without having to rely on a sequence of images. How many films or telly programmes have you seen where a character gets a phone call and shouts something like:

“What! The whole building is in flames!”.

Every time that happens, the distant rumbling sound you can hear is Kuleshov turning in his grave. Most makers of modern, mainstream films seem to have forgotten Kuleshov’s discovery and assume that the audience are all idiots who need everything explaining in simple language. Chris Marker made the brilliant film “La Jetee” using a sequence of still photographs (and this inspired Terry Gilliam’s excellent film 12 Monkeys). Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” is 2 hours and 40 minutes long but only contains 40 minutes of dialogue; the whole first section contains no speech at all, just one caption. The modern cinematic vogue for: explanatory dialogue followed by a load of action followed by a bit more explanatory dialogue followed by a load more action etc. etc. is lazy film-making and is also treating the audience like fools. If given the chance, most film watchers are capable of understanding far more than the mainstream film-makers give them credit for.

Cheers, Tom.