Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov

Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov (born Jan. 1 [Jan. 13, New Style], 1899, Tambov, Russia—died March 29, 1970, Moscow) was a Soviet film theorist and director who taught that structuring a film by montage (the cutting and editing of film and the juxtaposing of the images) was the most important aspect of filmmaking.

In 1910, after his father’s death, Kuleshov and his mother moved to Moscow, where four years later he began to study painting. The next year he began designing sets for the Khanzhonkov Film Studio in Moscow and in 1917 directed his first film, Proyekt inzhinera Prayta (The Project of Engineer Prite), in which he experimented with montage and the effective use of close-ups. In the next 10 years he perfected his style in films such as Na krasnom fronte (1920; On the Red Front), the first Soviet film to combine documentary shots with acted sequences, and Po zakonu (1926; According to the Law), based on a Jack London story of three people snowbound in a cabin for an entire winter.

Kuleshov also trained actors and directors at the Kuleshov Workshop, which had been formed in 1920. After being officially censured in 1935 for emphasizing the technical composition of films rather than their social content, he produced no major films. His major theoretical works are Art of the Cinema (1929), Practice of Film Direction (1935), and Fundamentals of Film Direction (1941).