Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov (Лев Владимирович Кулешов; 13 January O.S. 1 January] 1899 in Tambov - 29 March 1970 in Moscow) was a Russian filmmaker and film theorist who taught at and helped establish the world's first film school (the Moscow Film School).
Kuleshov may well be the very first film theorist as he was a leader in Soviet montage theory — developing his theories of editing before those of Sergei Eisenstein (briefly a student of Kuleshov) and Vsevolod Pudovkin. For Kuleshov, the essence of the cinema was editing, the juxtaposition of one shot with another. To illustrate this principle, he created what has come to be known as the Kuleshov Experiment. In this now-famous editing exercise, shots of an actor were intercut with various meaningful images (a casket, a bowl of soup, and so on) in order to show how editing changes viewers' interpretations of images.
In addition to his theoretical work, Kuleshov was an active director of feature-length films, until the Stalinist Russian government began to disapprove of the lack of revolutionary fervor in his work.
Filmography
- 1918 - The Project of Engineer Prite
- 1920 - On the Red Front
- 1924 - The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
- 1925 - The Death Ray
- 1926 - By the Law
- 1927 - Your Acquaintance
- 1929 - The Merry Canary[1]
- 1929 - Two-Bul'di-Two
- 1931 - Forty Hearts
- 1932 - The Horizon
- 1933 - The Great Consoler
- 1934 - Theft of Sight
- 1940 - The Siberians
- 1941 - Incident on a Volcano
- 1942 - Youthful Partisans: Kartashova, The Teacher
- 1944 - We from the Urals
Honours
See also
External links
Further reading
- Kuleshov, Lev. Kuleshov on Film, translated and edited, with an introduction by Ronald Levaco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
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