Background
Lev Kuleshov was born on January 13, 1899 in Tambov, Tambovskaya oblast, Russian Federation.
Lev Kuleshov was born on January 13, 1899 in Tambov, Tambovskaya oblast, Russian Federation.
In his youth, he studied painting at the School of Painting, Architecture and Sculpture and it was only by chance that he took a job as a set designer for Evgeni Bauer. That whetted his appetite for direction: his first film, Engineer Prite’s Project, was made in the first months of the Revolution. In this period of analytical, creative fervor, Kuleshov turned into a film didaet. Above all, he was struck by the implications of montage. On Engineer Prite he had noticed that a shot of a man looking, followed by a shot of another person, a place, or a building, suggested that the man was looking at that person or place.
By 1919, Kuleshov was teaching at the State Film School and conducting his famous experiments to extend the theory of montage. These included the shot of Mosjukhin intercut with shots of objects of quite different emotional values. He concluded, fairly enough, that the fickle face lent itself to those different objects with equal ease. In fact, Mosjukhin’s face had been expressionless, hut Kuleshov soon saw that montage was often more powerful than human expressiveness, and that audiences inteqireted facial expressions as if they were codified. This relates Kuleshov to the cinema of, among others, Godard, where it is admitted that film helps us to see how far we always interpret expressions and gestures.
Kuleshov also liked experiments that cut together shots of people in far-flung locations. He stated that, if the grammar or dynamics of cutting was fluent, then the celluloid spatial relationship—he called it “artificial landscape” or “creative geography”—was more important than real space. His stress on that wrong-headed, but it is clearly a useful theory when dealing with Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, directors who often relate people by means of editing. Indeed, Hitchcock’s obtrusive back projections cry out for the label “creative geography."
Kuleshov’s own films—or those made in the period 1924-34—sound worth seeing. Originally, it was the cross-cutting of Griffith and Sennett comedy that had aroused him. And his own films show an interest in American subjects and some indifference to revolutionary conventions. Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks w'as a comedy in the American style, as well as a view of Russia to correct American misunderstandings. The Death Ray is like a Mabuse story, with rival gangs and a much more violent melodrama than is usual in Russian cinema. By the Law is from a Jack London stoiy set in the Yukon, in which a couple of prospectors attempt to execute a criminal they have tried. A simple evocation of landscape, community, and the moral melodrama of a lonely pioneer taking the law into his own hands, it also concentrated on a few characters drawn in depth—one of them played by Kuleshovs wife, Alexandra Khokhlova.
Theorizing had led Kuleshov to draw up a comprehensive hut rigid code of “signs” to be conveyed by actors. This is something like an alphabet of responses, a system that any viewer might often conclude was implicit in cinema, hut that has awful dangers as a method taught to actors. Kuleshovs teaching was all the more important because in the early 1920s Russia was so short of film stock that lie acted out stories, as if they were being filmed, rather than expose film. Add to that his belief that, in montage, actors needed to know the scheme of editing and to emote almost by number, and it is easy to see the evolution of a stylized method that was exposed bv the naturalism of sound.
Kuleshov never seems to have come to terms with this. But his later films still sound fascinating. Horizon is a Mr. West in reverse: the story of a Russian Jew who emigrates to America, is disappointed by what he finds, and returns to a Russia now Sovietized. The Great Consoler; however, is by far his most ambitious work. It deals with the period in which W. S. Porter (O. Henry) was in prison, and blends his life with the material of some of his stories. Of necessity, it does this to teach Porter the need for commitment, but in its mixture of fact and fiction it may prove worthy of greater attention.
That is effectively the end of Kuleshovs output. In 1935 he was denounced by Stalinist forces and obliged to recant. His only other films were for children. But in 1944, and on Eisenstein’s recommendations, he was made head of the Moscow Film Institute, a teaching position he retained to the end of his life.
The Death Ray
1925The Great Consoler
1933Klyatva Timura
1942