Lev Kuleshov

Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov (Russian: Лев Влади́мирович Кулешо́в; 13 January [O.S. 1 January] 1899 – 29 March 1970) was a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist who taught at and helped establish the world's first film school (the Moscow Film School).

Career

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 1943. Since 1943 Kuleshov was serving as the academic rector of Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography.

Filmography

Awards and honours

• People's Artist of the RSFSR, 1969.
• Order of Lenin
• Order of the Red Banner of Labour

Further reading

• Kuleshov, Lev. Kuleshov on Film, translated and edited, with an introduction by Ronald Levaco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

External links

• Lev Kuleshov at the Internet Movie Database

• An interview with Lev Kuleshov's grand-daughter, the film scholar Ekaterina Khokhlova. By Ana Olenina.