Reading emotions from and into faces: Resurrecting a dimensional-contextual perspective

Students of film study an experiment conducted in the great Russian director Lev Kuleshov's experimental workshop just after the 1917 revolution (Cook, 1981). With students including Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Kuleshov created three silent film strips each ending with the same footage of a deliberately deadpan face of the actor Ivan Mozhukhin. In one strip Mozhukhin's face was preceded by a bowl of hot soup, in the second by a dead woman lying in a coffin, and in the third by a young girl playing with a teddy bear. The result was an illusion: Audiences saw emotions expressed in Mozhukhin's expressionless face. Pudovkin (1929/1970) recalled, "The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out 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 woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same" (p. 168).