Soviet Montage
Same face, different meaning, depending on what comes next. Lev Kuleshov is said to have cut an actor's blank expression together with a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a beautiful woman, and shown that audiences read "hunger," "grief," and "desire" into the same unchanging face each time. But the film from that experiment does not survive. Every version shown in textbooks and lectures is a later reconstruction. One of the most basic concepts in film theory rests on a story that no one has ever seen the original footage of. (As a side note, the actor was known for being expressive. "Blank-faced" may itself be part of the legend.) Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) has a similar story. The scene of people tumbling down the Odessa Steps is the most quoted few minutes in film history, but no massacre happened on those steps. It wasn't pure invention either. The arrival of the battleship Potemkin did trigger real clashes in the city, and soldiers' gunfire is said to have killed several hundred people. Eisenstein gathered events that were scattered across the city into a single place. And the scene that never happened became the world's memory of what did. The film was banned in many countries for a long time. In Britain it could not be shown from 1926 to 1954; an adults-only rating followed, eased only in 1987, and the rating changed again in 2025. A hundred years later, it's still moving. There's an ironic footnote. Goebbels praised the film as "incomparable" and urged German filmmakers to make a Nazi version of Potemkin. Eisenstein is said to have replied, in an open letter, that truth and Nazism cannot coexist.