Many have considered Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970) to be the ' father of Soviet cinema' he was after all one of the leading exponents of the then revolutionary art form. And like many a Russian filmmaker, Kuleshov came to the cinema after the actual Revolution and at an astonishingly young age to boot; he was all of 18 years old in 1917. Since no film stock existed with which to create feature films,an ambitious Kuleshov had little choice but to channel his energies into the establishment in 1921 of his own workshop at the new film school. It was here that Kushelov and his students would rehearse films that would never be produced or come to their fruition, these were the so-called 'films without film' It was at this time that Kuleshov first developed the idea that the distinctive nature of cinema, its superiority to the theater, lay in the principle of montage or editing. Experiments suggested to him that each film shot acquired meaning from its various sequences, the whole meaning could in fact be transformed. This epiphany was of crucial significance to the subsequent development of Soviet film theory which was to become known as the 'Kuleshov effect.'
Kuleshov acquired some experience of actual filming by travelling in the agitprop trains and he used the material he collected for his agitational film Na krasnon fronte (On The Red Front,1920). His first fictional feature film was the farcical 1924 effort, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr, West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, one of the most successful silent comedies produced by a Soviet. This was followed by the science-fiction silent, Luch smerti ( The Death Ray,1925) and the psychologically-orientated Po zakonu (By the Law, 1926), set in the Yukon smack dab in the midst of the Gold Rush. Kuleshov would make three consecutive silents and by the year 1929 produced his major contribution to film theory with Ikusstvo Kino (The Art of Cinema), a book that never has been fully translated into the English laguage.
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| The infamous Kuleshov Effect |