Lev Kuleshov

Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970), Soviet film director, theorist, and teacher. Kuleshov was among the first to advance the theory of “montage” (the cutting and editing together of moving-picture images), which was also developed, albeit in a different mode, by his pupil Sergey Eisenstein. Where Kuleshov and Eisenstein differed was in their interpretation of how editing should influence the spectator. Kuleshov—an admirer of American cinema—argued that montage should guide the viewer, creating a unified narrative through the assemblage and harmonization of disparate shots, a method exemplified in his 1924 satire Neobychainye priklyucheniya mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks). In contrast, Eisenstein advocated a more manipulative form of montage, in which the film-maker sets out to create meaning dialectically, through the juxtaposition of conflicting elements.

Kuleshov was born in Tambov, Russia, on January 14, 1899 and, having studied art in Moscow, worked as a set designer and occasional actor at the city's Khanzhonkov Film Studio. He soon graduated to directing silent films, with Proekt inzhenera Praita (1918; Engineer Praitt's Project) and Na krasnom fronte (1920; On the Red Front), the latter film innovatively combining documentary footage and drama; Kuleshov had served as a documentarist on the Eastern front for the Bolsheviks during the Revolution of 1917. After the Revolution he taught at the Moscow State Film School where he led workshops of which so-called “films without film” were the product—technical exercises in film technique that, due to shortages in film stock, were never committed to celluloid. In one of his cinematographic experiments, which became renowned as 'the Kuleshov effect', he demonstrated that the meaning of an image could be transformed by changing its context. For example, the same expressionless image of a face could convey happiness or sorrow depending on the images that surrounded it: a child playing, a dead woman.

Among Kuleshov’s other films were the melodrama Po zakonu (1926; By the Law), based on the Jack London story “The Unexpected”, and the sound film Velikii uteshitel (1933; The Great Consoler), a biography of the American writer O. Henry. In the mid-1930s Kuleshov fell out of favour with the Soviet authorities because his films were deemed to be too formalist and out of step with contemporary issues, although he continued to teach and assumed the directorship of the Moscow State Institute of Cinema in 1944. He died in Moscow on March 29, 1970.