Kuleshov effect is an editing experiment showing that audiences derive meaning from the juxtaposition of shots rather than from any single shot alone.
Around 1918–1920 the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov ran a celebrated experiment: he cut the same neutral close-up of the actor Ivan Mosjoukine against three different following shots — a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan. Audiences praised Mosjoukine's performance for its hunger, then for its grief, then for its lust, never realising they were looking at the identical face each time. The Kuleshov effect became a foundational principle of film editing and of the broader Soviet montage theory developed by Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov. It demonstrated that meaning in cinema is created in the cut, not in the shot — that the audience is always assembling, inferring, projecting. Hitchcock cited it constantly when explaining his craft. Every modern film and every advertisement that lets two adjacent images do its emotional work depends on what Kuleshov first proved.