Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of a Tsarist actor was alternated with various other shots: a plate of soup, a girl, a little girl's coffin.
The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on the actor's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mozzhukhin was the same shot repeated over and over again. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about the acting.... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."
The Russians knew the importance of montage and film editing and this is a very early example of how film was edited in such a way to convey emotion.
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