The Kuleshov Effect, Explained With 8 Famous Film Scenes

In 1964 Alfred Hitchcock sat down with a Canadian TV crew and ran an experiment on his own face. First shot: Hitchcock, squinting, then smiling. Cut to a young mother with a baby, then back to the smile. He is a kind old man. Now swap the mother for a woman in a bikini. Same smile, same frames. He is, in his words, a “dirty old man”.

Nothing in his performance changed. The shot next to it did. That is the Kuleshov effect, and this guide covers where it came from, whether the science backs it, and 8 Kuleshov effect examples from famous films. Spoilers ahead.

What is the Kuleshov effect?

The Kuleshov effect is what happens in a viewer’s head at a cut. We do not see shot A and shot B as separate things. We assume they are connected, and we invent the connection. A man looks. We see a thing. So the man is looking at the thing, and he must feel something about it.

Editors write it as A + B = C. C is not on the film. The audience supplies it. Eisenstein pushed the same idea into the match cut, where two images add up to a third meaning.

This is juxtaposition in film at its simplest. Put two images side by side and each one changes the other. It is why a reaction shot works, why a point of view shot works, and why an actor can do very little and still break your heart. In the Kuleshov effect in film, the face is half the performance. The cut is the other half.

The Kuleshov experiment

The famous version goes like this. Around 1920 the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov took a close-up of Ivan Mozzhukhin, a star of Tsarist cinema, from an old film. The actor’s face was neutral. Kuleshov cut that one shot against three others and showed the result to viewers.

They praised the acting. According to Kuleshov’s student Vsevolod Pudovkin, they admired the man’s pensive mood over the soup, his sorrow at the coffin and his desire for the woman. Pudovkin’s punchline: “the face was exactly the same.”

It is a great story, and the details will not hold still.

Who tells it	The three shots
The common version	A bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan
Pudovkin’s written account	A bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, a girl playing with a toy bear
Hitchcock, to Truffaut	A dead baby and a plate of soup

Here is what we can say for certain:

• The footage is lost. No print and no stills survive. Historians are not sure a finished reel ever existed.
• The date is unknown. Sources give anything from 1918 to the early 1920s.
• The reporter was Pudovkin, in 1929. Kuleshov’s own account differs from his.
• It may never have had a public audience. One reading is that it was a workshop demonstration for other filmmakers.

So the Kuleshov experiment is closer to a founding legend than a lab result. The idea it stands for is another matter, and we will get to the evidence.

Who was Lev Kuleshov?

Lev Kuleshov (1899 to 1970) started as a set designer in 1916 and helped found the Moscow Film School, which is described as the first film school in the world. His workshop opened there in 1920. Film stock was so scarce after the Revolution that the group rehearsed “films without film”.

His students included Pudovkin and Boris Barnet, and Sergei Eisenstein attended briefly. Pudovkin’s tribute was: “We make films, Kuleshov made cinema.”

Kuleshov ran a second experiment that editors still use daily. In 1921 he filmed a woman walking on one Moscow street and a man on another, cut them to meet on a third, and had them look up at the White House, lifted from an American film. Audiences saw one continuous place. He called it creative geography. Hold on to that one for number 5.

Does the Kuleshov effect really exist?

Psychologists have tested it, and the answer is yes, with a catch.

Study	Method	Result
Prince and Hensley, 1992	137 viewers, a remake of the original	No effect. Viewers saw a blank face
Mobbs and others, 2006	Brain scans (fMRI)	Context changed how the same faces were rated
Barratt and others, 2016	36 viewers, 24 sequences, eye tracking	“Some sort of Kuleshov effect does in fact exist”
Calbi and others, 2017	Ratings of neutral faces	An effect for fear contexts only
Cao and others, 2024	Real film sequences, ratings and fMRI	Confirmed. Fearful scenes pulled ratings negative, happy scenes positive

The catch is the word neutral. A truly blank face, cut once against a bowl of soup, does little. The effect shows up when the shots are built like a film: a look, a thing looked at, a return to the look. Context tilts the reading. It does not paint an emotion on nothing.

A 2017 study found that music does the same job. Change the score and viewers rate the same face differently.

Hitchcock’s version

Hitchcock learned the experiment from Pudovkin’s writing and spent a career using it. He described it to François Truffaut with Mozzhukhin, the dead baby and the soup. Then he made it his own. Take James Stewart smiling at a small dog being lowered in a basket, he said, and you have a kindly man. Replace the dog with a half-dressed girl exercising at her window, and the same smile belongs to a creep.

He called this kind of storytelling pure cinema: meaning made by pictures and cuts, with no help from dialogue. His best proof is number 1 on the list.

8) Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Eisenstein proved the effect does not even need a face. He did it with three statues.

• First screened: 21 December 1925, Moscow
• Director: Sergei Eisenstein
• Editor: Eisenstein, with Grigori Aleksandrov (both uncredited)
• Shot A: A stone lion asleep
• Shot B: A second lion waking, then a third on its feet
• What we read into it: One lion, roused and rising in anger

The cut:

After the massacre on the Odessa Steps, the battleship’s guns answer. Eisenstein cuts to three marble lions in under three seconds: lying down, head raised, standing. No statue moves. The audience sees an animal wake up, and reads it as the people rising.

The lions are not even in Odessa. They sit on a terrace at the Vorontsov Palace in Alupka, Crimea, hundreds of kilometres away. That is Kuleshov’s creative geography at work inside the same cut.

Use it: The effect works on objects. Three stills in the right order will read as motion and as feeling.

7) Psycho (1960)

Hitchcock uses one pause in one shot to move the audience on to the side of a man hiding a body.

• Release date: 16 June 1960 (New York premiere)
• Director: Alfred Hitchcock
• Editor: George Tomasini
• Shot A: Norman Bates at the edge of the swamp, chewing, watching
• Shot B: Marion’s car going down, then stopping
• What we read into it: His panic, which becomes ours

The cut:

Norman has cleaned the bathroom and pushed the car into the water. We cut between his face and the white roof sinking. Then the car stops, half under.

Anthony Perkins barely moves. A glance to the side, a small swallow. Cut against the stuck car, that is dread. The car starts sinking again, he gives a tiny smile, and it reads as relief. Hitchcock told Truffaut that at this moment the public is thinking, “I hope it goes all the way down!”

Ten minutes earlier the audience was with Marion. The edit has changed sides, and taken us with it.

Use it: Sympathy follows the look. Give any character a clear look, a clear problem and a cut between them, and the audience will share the problem.

6) Jurassic Park (1993)

Spielberg runs the experiment backwards. He shows the reaction first and makes us wait for the thing.

• Release date: 11 June 1993
• Director: Steven Spielberg
• Editor: Michael Kahn
• Shot A: Alan Grant, mouth open, pulling off his sunglasses
• Shot B: Held back. Then the brachiosaurus
• What we read into it: Awe, before we know what it is for

The cut:

The jeep stops. The camera pushes in on Grant (Sam Neill), who stands and fumbles his glasses off. He reaches over and turns Ellie Sattler’s head. Her jaw drops in the middle of a sentence. We still have not seen what they see.

Only then does the camera move behind them and rise to the dinosaur. By that point the faces have told us how to feel, so the effect shot lands on an audience that is already amazed.

The look has a name. Kevin B. Lee’s 2011 video essay made “the Spielberg face” a common term, building on an article by Matt Patches. See the islands in our guide to where Jurassic Park was filmed.

Use it: Delay shot B. A face reacting to something we cannot see builds more anticipation than the thing itself.

5) The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Here the effect is used to lie. Two doorbells, two houses, and an edit that swears they are the same place.

• Release date: 14 February 1991
• Director: Jonathan Demme
• Editor: Craig McKay, Oscar nominated for the film
• Shot A: An FBI team at a front door in Calumet City, Illinois
• Shot B: A buzzer ringing in Buffalo Bill’s basement
• What we read into it: The FBI has found him

The cut:

Agents surround a house. One presses the bell. Cut to the basement, where a bell rings and Jame Gumb looks up. Cut outside, cut inside. Every rule of film grammar says these shots share a wall.

Then Gumb opens his door, and Clarice Starling is standing there, alone, in Belvedere, Ohio. The FBI has an empty house in another state.

This is creative geography turned against the viewer. Kuleshov joined two Moscow streets to make one place. Demme and McKay join two towns so that the truth hits us and Clarice at the same second. The film won the five major Oscars.

Use it: The audience connects shots without being asked. You can use that habit to mislead them, once, if the reveal is fair.

4) Drive (2011)

Ryan Gosling gives the closest thing modern cinema has to the Mozzhukhin face, and the edit fills it in.

• Release date: 16 September 2011 (US)
• Director: Nicolas Winding Refn, Best Director at Cannes
• Editor: Matthew Newman
• Shot A: The Driver, still, almost expressionless
• Shot B: Irene smiling. Or a man with a gun
• What we read into it: Tenderness in one scene, threat in the next

The cut:

Refn gave the Driver very little dialogue, and Gosling holds the same calm half-smile through long stretches of the film. Cut against Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son, that face is gentle. Cut against a pawn shop robbery or a stranger in a diner, the same face is frightening.

The elevator scene puts both readings in one room. He notices the gun under a man’s jacket. He turns, kisses Irene, slowly. Then he stamps the man to death. The last pair of shots is his face and hers as the doors close, and the film lets the cut say what neither of them will.

This is the answer to “Kuleshov effect in modern films”. The technique is a century old, and a 2011 crime film is built on it.

Use it: Underplaying is safe when the edit is doing the work. A quiet performance gives the cut more room to mean something.

3) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Kubrick gets a performance out of a red light bulb.

• Release date: 3 April 1968 (US)
• Director: Stanley Kubrick
• Editor: Ray Lovejoy
• Shot A: HAL 9000’s lens, a red dot in a black panel
• Shot B: Two astronauts talking in a sealed pod, seen through the window
• What we read into it: Suspicion, then a decision to kill

The cut:

Bowman and Poole shut themselves in a pod so that HAL cannot hear them discuss switching him off. Kubrick cuts to the lens. Then to a silent close view of their mouths moving. Then back to the lens.

The lens cannot change. It has no eyelids, no brow, nothing to act with. But after that cut everyone in the cinema knows that HAL is reading their lips and that he is afraid. In the roadshow version the intermission came next, which left the audience alone with that thought.

HAL is one of our seven types of conflict in film, under character vs technology.

Use it: If a fixed red light can show fear, any object can carry emotion. Decide what it is “looking” at and cut to that.

2) Jaws (1975)

On a crowded beach, Spielberg builds five minutes of terror from a man sitting in a chair.

• Release date: 20 June 1975
• Director: Steven Spielberg
• Editor: Verna Fields, who won the Oscar for it
• Shot A: Chief Brody on the sand, watching the water
• Shot B: Swimmers. A dog. A boy on a yellow raft
• What we read into it: Every splash is an attack that has not happened yet

The cut:

Brody (Roy Scheider) knows there is a shark, and the mayor has kept the beach open. So he sits and watches. People walk across the frame in front of him, and Spielberg uses each one as a wipe, jumping closer to Brody’s face each time.

What Brody sees is harmless. A large woman floating. A man surfacing in a black cap. A girl shrieking as her boyfriend lifts her. Cut against his face, each one is a false alarm, and the scene tightens by a notch.

When the attack comes, the camera dollies in and zooms out on Brody at once, so the beach stretches away behind him. We have been inside his look for so long that we feel it as our own. Find the real beach in where Jaws was filmed.

Use it: Repeat the pattern. Look, object, look, object, with the face a little closer each time. Suspense is the Kuleshov effect on a loop.

1) Rear Window (1954)

Rear Window is the Kuleshov experiment at feature length: a man looks, we see what he sees, and we watch him react, for 112 minutes.

• Release date: 1 September 1954 (US)
• Director: Alfred Hitchcock
• Editor: George Tomasini
• Shot A: L. B. Jefferies at his window, leg in plaster
• Shot B: The neighbours across the courtyard
• What we read into it: Amusement, pity, desire, suspicion and finally fear, from a man who never leaves his chair

The cut:

Jefferies (James Stewart) is a photographer stuck in his apartment with a broken leg. He passes the time watching the windows opposite: a dancer, a lonely woman, newlyweds, a salesman with a sick wife. Then the wife is gone, and the salesman is cleaning a saw.

The whole film is built from three pieces. Stewart looks. We see a window. Stewart reacts. Hitchcock told Truffaut that this was “the purest expression of a cinematic idea”, and he named Kuleshov and Pudovkin as the source.

Watch what that does to Stewart’s performance. He smiles at the dancer and he is a bit of a voyeur. He gives nearly the same smile at the newlyweds and he is wistful. He stares at the salesman’s dark window and we read dread, from a man holding a camera lens and doing very little with his face.

The ending turns it round. The killer looks back, straight across the courtyard, at Jefferies and at us. The film joined the National Film Registry in 1997.

That is the lesson I took from it as a filmmaker. You do not have to ask an actor for more. Sometimes you need a better shot B.

Use it: Look, see, react. If a scene is not working, check that all three pieces are there and in that order.

Kuleshov effect vs Soviet montage

The Kuleshov effect is one finding. Soviet montage is the school of filmmaking that grew up around it in the 1920s, and its two biggest names disagreed about what a cut is for.

• Kuleshov and Pudovkin: linkage. Shots are bricks. You lay them in a row and build a scene, and the viewer follows the chain. Pudovkin wrote that a film is not shot but built.
• Eisenstein: collision. Two shots should clash, and the idea comes out of the crash. He called linkage one special case of montage, and the stone lions are his reply to it.

Hollywood took the linkage side. Every look, object and reaction in a mainstream film is a Kuleshov brick. For the wider map of ideas, see our guide to film theory.

How to use the Kuleshov effect in your own edit

You can test this on any timeline in an afternoon. If you are new to all of this, start with our filmmaking guide.

1. Shoot the look clean. Get a held close-up of your actor looking off camera, with a small, real change near the end: a breath, a blink, the start of a smile. Keep the eyeline consistent with the 180 degree rule.
2. Choose shot B for meaning. Ask what the audience should feel, then pick the insert that gives the face that feeling. Plan these inserts on the storyboard and the coverage list, because they are easy to forget on the day.
3. Come back to the face, and hold. The return shot is where the meaning lands. Cutting away too soon throws it away. Framing matters here, so keep the shot composition of A steady between cuts.
4. Run the swap test. Replace shot B with something unrelated. If the scene does not change, the cut was not doing anything, and the scene was relying on dialogue.

Nothing about the performance had changed. I stopped blaming actors for a lot of things after that, and started shooting more inserts.

FAQ: Kuleshov effect

The Final Cut on the Kuleshov effect

The original reel is gone, and nobody can agree what was in it. It does not matter. Every film on this list is the experiment, run again in front of millions of people, and it works every time the shots are built with care.

The Kuleshov effect is the reason editing is an art and not an assembly job. An actor gives you a face. The cut decides what it means.

Which scene would you add? Tell us in the comments.