Does he look Contemplative:

contemplative

Does he look lost in thought to you? Is he contemplating the meaning of existence as he stares along the beach and across the edge of Cardigan bay, thinking of the relentlessly rolling waves and clouds? Or is he staring at something in particular?

If you stand silently and expressionlessly, people project their own thoughts and feelings on to you. If you do that at a funeral, people might think you are sad. If you do it in a restaurant, people might think you are hungry.

This principle of projection is exploited in feature films and is named “The Kuleshov Effect” after Lev Kuleshov who first experimented with it in Soviet Russia in 1918. If you show an image of a man’s face followed by an image of a bowl of soup, the audience assumes that the man is looking at the bowl of soup. If you show the same image of the man’s face followed by different images -  a pretty woman, a corpse, a painting - the audience assumes that the man is looking at those things.  But that isn’t all: they also think his expression has changed because the different objects chosen by the film-makers cause different thoughts and resonances in the mind of the viewer.

Every time you get a shot of Inspector Morse‘s blank face, The Kuleshov Effect is being exploited. The human mind links images that are shown in succession and so the choice of successive images can be used to direct (or even manipulate) the viewers mind and so tell a story, without words; you know what Morse is thinking because of what went before and what comes after. True cinematic art is poetry with images. Image after image in a carefully chosen sequence that have a cumulative effect on the viewer.

Instead, many modern films tell us in words exactly what is going on: they are over-talkie. A picture really can paint a thousand words, and I wish more makers of mainstream films would remember this.

(In fact, Dan wanted to run off, but I'd told him to sit for a picture)

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. A longer version of this post is in the film blog here: http://films.blog.co.uk/2008/08/19/the-kuleshov-effect-4607541