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In 1918 a Russian filmmaker sat down at an editing table with a pile of leftover film and accidentally proved something about how audiences think.

Lev Kuleshov had a close-up of the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin staring into the camera with a completely neutral expression. He started attaching other shots to it and asking people what they saw.

Same face, three different men

Mozzhukhin’s gaze, then a bowl of soup on a kitchen table. Viewers said the man was hungry.

The same gaze, then an open coffin. Viewers said he was grieving.

The same gaze again, then a wide shot of a young woman reclining on a couch. Viewers said he was looking at her with desire.

The performance never changed. Not once. Kuleshov was running the identical piece of film every time. The emotion those viewers were certain they had seen on his face was assembled in their own heads out of two shots sitting next to each other.

The third shot

The effect has another name that explains it better: the third clip effect. Two real shots go in, and the audience builds an imaginary third one between them to make the pair make sense. That invented shot is where the meaning lives.

Follow the idea out and it gets a little vertiginous. Any film with more than one shot in it is running on this. Every cut asks the audience to build a connection that exists in neither frame. Editing is not arranging images in order. It is handing people materials and trusting them to construct the thing you want them to feel.

Try this on your next project

Shoot the neutral take. When you cover a performance, get one version where your actor does almost nothing. It will feel like a wasted setup in the moment and it will save you in the edit, because a neutral face can be pointed at anything. A face already doing the emotion can only ever do that one thing.

Who made this

• Host: Joshua Randolph
• Writer: Arthur Groys
• Copy Editor: Brianna Andersen
• Editor: Matt McGee
• Animation: Ahmed Sanad
• Music: Ilia Klimenchenko

Keep going: Step Printing · The MacGuffin

About Global Lens

Global Lens is a film education series from Ineffable Films, a 501©(3) nonprofit working out of San Diego, New York, Los Angeles and Boston. Each episode traces a single technique or cultural contribution that shaped cinema, with an eye on the filmmakers and traditions that standard film history tends to skip. The series sits inside our wider work empowering emerging and underserved filmmakers through mentorship, festival access, education and community screenings.

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