ABSTRACT
Until the invention of cinema editing at the start of the twentieth century, no one had ever seen a cut before. The remarkable meaning inferred by the simple cutting together of two shots was tested at the turn of the twentieth century soon after the invention of cinema by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. He edited together a short film in which a shot of an expressionless face—that of Russian silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine—was cut in alternation with three other shots: a plate of soup, a child in a coffin and a scantily clad woman. By simply editing each of the shot pairs together, Kuleshov had encouraged his subjects to do this, 'tricking' them into projecting their own interpretations onto a recreation of the Kuleshov Effect. Pictures are the most powerful storytelling device that we have as film-makers. The extreme wide shot captures the environment or context in which the scene and characters are set from a distanced perspective.
