Kuleshov Effect

The Kuleshov effect is a phenomenon in film perception in which viewers derive meaning from two shots shown in sequence that neither shot conveys on its own. The Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov demonstrated it in the 1910s and 1920s by cutting between the same shot of an actor's expressionless face and different following images, such as a bowl of soup, a coffin, or a woman on a divan, and audiences reported seeing different emotions on the actor's face depending on which image came next. The effect showed that viewers actively bring their own emotional interpretation to a sequence of images and then attribute that interpretation back to what they saw.