The Kuleshov Effect

During the 1920's Lev Kuleshov was among the first to theorise that the essence of cinema was the editing of a film, the juxtaposition of one shot to another. He created an experiment using montage that lead the viewer to reach certain conclusions about the action in a film, the viewers infer meaning based on the context of the situation. His now famous "Kuleshov experiment" uses shots of an actor that were intercut with meaningful images (a casket, a bowl of soup, a woman etc.) in order to show how editing images changes viewers interpretations depending on the context given, as they would infer their own meaning onto the images.

These images manage to convey different emotions to the audience and they interpret them in a different way each time depending on the image intercut with the shot of the actor, even though the image of the actor is the same shot reused with different context the audience still interprets it in a different way to convey meaning.