In the early days of Soviet cinema, filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted an experiment that would become one of the most famous ideas in film theory. He took the same shot of an actor with a neutral expression and paired it with different images such as a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a woman on a divan.
Even though the actor’s facial expression never changed, the audience believed they saw different emotions on his face. When paired with the soup, the audience saw hunger. With the girl in a coffin, they saw sadness, and with the woman, they saw desire. The audience was giving meaning to his expression based on the image beside it. This became known as the Kuleshov Effect.
I think we do the same thing in everyday life.
When someone does not reply to your message, you assume they are angry with you. You start thinking maybe you said something wrong. If it is someone you are dating, you think perhaps they have lost interest. Then they eventually reply and tell you they were driving or simply busy. With that response, the unanswered message does not change. Your interpretation does.
You see, we often struggle to separate what happened from what we think it means. “They did not reply” is what happened. “They are ignoring me” is an interpretation. “He did not greet me” is what happened. “He thinks he is better than me” is an interpretation.
But sometimes our interpretation is correct. People do ignore us. People can be rude. The point, however, is not to doubt everything you see. It is important to recognise the difference between what you know and what you have concluded.
This is where the Kuleshov Effect moves from film into everyday life. We are constantly putting scenes together in our minds. We take today’s silence and put it beside yesterday’s argument. We put a facial expression beside something we heard about someone. From those pieces, we form a picture of what we think is happening.
The funny thing is, sometimes we do actually read the scene correctly. Other times we connect things that have no connection at all and respond to a reality we have created ourselves.
Perhaps the useful lesson from Kuleshov is to occasionally separate the scenes again to see what actually happened, and what your mind is visualising before you start judging people.
