{"id":303,"date":"2011-02-12T15:33:15","date_gmt":"2011-02-12T23:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.savagenobles.com\/?p=303"},"modified":"2011-02-12T15:33:15","modified_gmt":"2011-02-12T23:33:15","slug":"kuleshov-komics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/?p=303","title":{"rendered":"Kuleshov Komics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Kuleshov Effect is a phenomenon in cinema whereby audiences perceive facial expressions differently depending on context. In the 1910&#8217;s and 20&#8217;s, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov designed an experiment that involved a sort of movie collage: A shot of a bowl of soup, followed by the impassive face of handsome actor Ivan Mozzhukin reacting to it; then a shot of a little child in a coffin, followed by Mozzhukin&#8217;s face again; finally a shot of a beautiful and seductively dressed woman, and Mozzhukin&#8217;s reaction. Audiences praised Mozzhukin&#8217;s brilliantly subtle acting, his nuanced expression of hunger, restrained grief, and boiling lust. But as you probably have predicted already, each reaction shot was exactly the same &#8211; the same footage every time.<\/p>\n<p>Alfred Hitchcock explains the same phenomenon in this video:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" width=\"480\" height=\"390\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/hCAE0t6KwJY\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO COMICS?<\/p>\n<p><strong>On the one hand<\/strong>, comics artists, and cartoonists in particular, have an obsession with, almost a fetishization of, facial expressions. From the simplest distillation of an emotion into a few carefully-chosen lines, to an elaborately rendered portrait of a distinct countenance, we all seem to strive for the most evocative faces possible. Some people have actually insisted this is <em>the single most important<\/em> storytelling mechanism for a comics artist, more important even than body language. The <a href=\"http:\/\/lackadaisy.foxprints.com\/exhibit.php?exhibitid=333\">ridiculously great facial-expression guide<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/lackadaisy.foxprints.com\/comic.php\">Lackadaisy<\/a> artist and comics samurai Tracy Butler has been making the rounds on the internet, and deservedly so. She&#8217;s got the art of drawing facial expressions down to a science (or maybe the science down to an art &#8211; I&#8217;m not sure.)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.savagenobles.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/Lackadaisy-Expressions.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>But on the other hand<\/strong>, comics are not single images like a painting, but an arranged series, like a movie. Because we tell our stories through sequential juxtaposition, <strong>*ahem, puts on green plaid shirt and opaque full-moon glasses*<\/strong>, why exactly do we need the perfect, nuanced facial expression every time, when, at least according to the theory of the Kuleshov effect, a perfectly neutral face will do? An incredible amount of emotion can be imparted into a blank face given the context that comics can provide. <a href=\"http:\/\/saraholeksyk.com\/\">Sarah Oleksyk<\/a> took this to its sublime extreme in one of my favorite single comics panels of all time, from book five of her series <em>Ivy<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.savagenobles.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/OleksykKuleshov.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Here, perhaps the biggest emotional turning point of the entire series is represented a 3\/4-rear shot. What is Ivy thinking? Oleksyk doesn&#8217;t say. She only asks what YOU think she&#8217;s thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Two years ago, when I started this comic you&#8217;re reading now, I had not heard the term &#8220;Kuleshov Effect,&#8221; but I knew I was interested in the comics possibilities of blank, ambiguous facial expressions, and I used them a lot. This was particularly useful since I was still learning how to draw.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.savagenobles.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/GregKuleshov.gif\"><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve come a long way in my artistic abilities since then, and I like to think I&#8217;m capable of much more convincing, expressive faces that are interesting in themselves. But sometimes I worry that I&#8217;ve thrown out baby Kuleshov with the bathwater. I try to remember that sometimes, rather than telegraphing emotion so obviously, the right thing to do is to let the reader fill in their own subtext.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.savagenobles.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/Signature.gif\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Kuleshov Effect is a phenomenon in cinema whereby audiences perceive facial expressions differently depending on context. In the 1910&#8217;s and 20&#8217;s, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov designed an experiment that involved a sort of movie collage: A shot of a bowl of soup, followed by the impassive face of handsome actor Ivan Mozzhukin reacting to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}