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I am always worried that my favorite (non canon) ships are perpetuated solely by the kuleshov effect; that the audience sees what they want to in the character’s facial expressions and words instead of what is actually there.
That being said, I do not have to worry about that for Thorin and Bilbo.
I'm outsourcing this because it's driving me crazy. When you look up the Kuleshov Effect, you're bound to get this exact set of images:
with the implication that they're stills from the original experiment. But they're not- all sources say that the original film is lost. Also, the actor featured in the original (Russian film star Ivan Mosjoukine, who would have been about 29 at the time) doesn't particularly look like this guy.
The earliest appearance of these images online that I can find is this youtube video from March 2009. The video has no description and the channel only has one other video (a clip from Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-Féminin). I'd guess the Kuleshov clip to be from a Soviet documentary, based on the Russian titles, and so thought it could be the 1969 documentary "The Kuleshov Effect," in which Lev Kuleshov discusses his work, but no luck. I checked a few research studies that reproduced the effect, but their shots were different, & I've followed that tiny watermark on the first image, but it's just a 2013 article. I'm hitting a brick wall! If anyone out there knows the source of this reproduction and how it became the face of the Kuleshov Effect, I'd love to know. Thanks!
The demon Crowley, as an impressive and somewhat gothic vampire hunter
And the… angel? Aziraphale? … huh
The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Russian film-maker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.
Wikipedia
So there's this study that was done in the early 1920s (that was shown to me during two separate "film editing 101" courses) called the "Kuleshov effect."
The experiment was simple, and rather than trying to explain what it was, I'll just link a modern remake below, it's only a minute.
The actor has an expressionless face.
But depending on what we're shown once we cut away - be it a kid in a coffin, a woman on a sofa or a gourmet meal - we, as viewers, will project our own emotional reactions to the sequence of images, and the actor's impassive face.
In the absence of context, we create it ourselves by hanging on to what little information we have to then form a narrative.
In the Prequels, we either aren't shown or aren't shown in an emotionally-satisfying way:
How the Jedi teach all younglings to love without becoming attached.
How the Jedi's culture works.
What their status is, in the grand scheme of the Republic (not very high, and they're powerless to change it).
The Jedi's day-to-day, mediating between planetary leaders, helping them find compromise.
The Jedi's various interactions with Anakin.
The Jedi having fun, laughing, eating lunch, being shown in a normal, humanized light.
We know that most of this stuff is happening because GL says so, but the Prequels aren't supposed to be their films... so he only shows just enough of the Jedi Order to serve his stories of how Anakin and the Republic's gave in to their greed and fear and became Vader and the Empire.
AKA, the absent context, the blank expression on the actor's face.
So an audience that wanted to know more about the above-listed items but instead got a whole lot of "politics" talk will either reject the movies entirely out of disappointment, or attempt to engage with the material, in which case they'll go:
"The Jedi forbid love, that's what their whole culture is all about, repressing emotions, they can do more but can't, they always mistreated Anakin and were trying to purge themselves of all humanity in service of logic and the greater good."
AKA, the projection, like with the Kuleshov test.
That's not what the films say, nor is it the narrative intent.
But in the absence of context explicitly disproving any of this in an emotionally-satisfying way, the audience won't help but project their own impression of the Jedi ("holier than thou, hypocritical assholes" - an opinion formed because the Jedi were not developed or humanized enough on-screen) onto the narrative.
And there's only so much legwork Lucas' commentary, comics, books and TCW can do.
omg thank u for introducing me to the term kuleshov effect, that is my favorite aspect of fan edits it makes me go insane
it's so fucking cool, i was actually gonna make a video essay for a final project (before i realized that i don't know how to use a video editor + other problems befouled me) comparing two movies illustrating the connections and the contrasts i was making using the kuleshov effect, which would have pretty much just straightup been an amv using songs from one of the movies.
it's part of why a good gifset is one of my favorite kinds of fandom meta - clips from x episode paired with clips from y later episode, etc - like !!!!! you're making a connection and holding it up for me to look at directly so i can then make that connection myself purely through the juxtaposition!!!!!!!! that's so cool!!!!!!!!
like, look at this
➤ Vanya & Five + parallels [ID: An 18-piece-gifset of Vanya and Five Hargreeves from the TV-adaptation of the Umbrella Academy. The gifset
you see what i'm saying??? the meaning comes from the interraction of the paired gifs/lines
or this one
Number Five + smiling as a threat vs. smiling genuinely
which does like, angle or lighting comparison in addition to the contrast in emotion - shot comparison! match shots! et cetera!
like, the meaning here isn't coming from the caption, i don't see that until later, it's coming from seeing these visuals & dialogue juxtaposed and interpreting something from the decision to pair them. that's video essay
but like to get back to videos and amvs and the kuleshov effect and soviet montage in general - look at this supernatural amv. i've never seen supernatural but this is one of my favorite songs by the mountain goats, and there are lines in it that were put in a completely new perspective for me by watching this amv and seeing what shots the editor put under which lines
supernatural 4x01 lazarus rising / psalms 40:2 by the mountain goats
soviet montage is a style that developed pretty much in direct response to western/hollywood continuity editing, and specifically in response to the film birth of a nation, which was interesting to the soviet filmmakers in the way that they saw the style of filmmaking aided the film in selling the story of the KKK to the american audience
continuity editing stylistically wants to be noticed as little as possible, and guide you along the viewing of the movie, blurring the lines between your reality and the reality of the film (the idea of the suspension of disbelief) through things that mimic the real life experience of moving throug the world - shot-to-shot things like showing the exterior of the building and then the interior, keeping the camera within the same 180 degrees in a single scene so the people you're filming aren't suddenly on different sides of the camera (the viewer); and scene-to-scene things like having events occur chronologically (and if not, having a clear indication of flashback or flash forward as per filmmaking convention)
the soviet filmmakers saw this as like, some capitalist propaganda bullshit because it encouraged you to take in these ideas without necessarily thinking or critically examining them, and so it was very easy to make the KKK the heroes by just building a triumphant narrative around them, and how that narrative is shown to the viewer depends on how it's edited
and so montage editing, which is rising out of the same school of filmmaking as the kuleshov effect, is in direct response to that, to try and find a style of editing that makes the viewer pay attention to the techniques and to the fact that they're watching a film, keeps their brain engaged, and has them draw their own conclusions from what they're shown rather than being gently handed the conclusions by the film. so it's a style that is built on inviting thought and critique, and therefore a pretty natural style for expressing audiovisual critique and analysis
(amvs also have their roots in this style bc soviet filmmakers were often working with recutting american films rather than filming their own due to lack of funds for purchasing film. which is pretty cool)
if you wanna check out a cool classic example of soviet montage editing, vertov's man with a movie camera (1hr) is really fun, kind of a "day in the life" but also a display of different effects you can get by using a film camera in different ways, bit of stop motion, etc
(vertov is also a really interesting, he coined the idea of kino-eye, which is about the way that the camera looks at the world and how that's different from how a human eye looks at the world, and also, the way the world reacts or changes in response to being looked at by the camera. which is Pretty Relevant Right Now I'd Say! glares at tiktok. glares at surveilence state. anyway you might wanna check that out too it's a bit tangental to the topic but still relevant in terms of the idea of film as unique medium which can be used to express ideas differently than the written word)
