Metaphor, Metonymy and the Kuleshov Effect

Before describing the Kuleshov Effect and the Metaphor/Metonymy relationship, let's look at our considerations of film viewership from the very first week.

 

Film Viewership  

Audience engagement with film makes it a vehicle for communication. This allows for opportunities of cognition, or the process of knowing or thinking about something. Cognition in cinema can occur when the camera serves as a construct that allows viewers to reinterpret the role of the film camera. You can think of this occurring through conversations after screenings of films, or when a theory like Plato's Allegory of the Cave allows us to re-examine our relationship to cinema. We are not passively accepting information from the film, but actively assessing relationships between sound and image that make meaning.

 

You can think of "Cognition" occurring at the tail-end of a film screening through a panel discussion about the film.

 

Metaphor and Metonymy

Ruggero Eugeni, the author of "Rhetoric, Film and," in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory (p. 408-412) outlines metaphor and metonymy as two terms that consider the relationship between shots in a sequence. 

Metaphor: Connection by similarity (As in poetry or editing, a fire standing in for gaslight)

Metonymy: Connection by contiguity (As in narrative prose or visual information, glass for window). According to Eugeni, this is the primary form of cinematic expression. 

 

 

To better illustrate this idea of metonymy in film -

During the implementation of the production code throughout Hollywood productions in the 1950s and 1960s, filmmakers couldn't show explicit sexual encounters between characters (nor have them sleeping in the same bed!). Filmmakers navigated around this by inserting a shot of a fireplace. The warm glow of the burning embers suggested romantic love between characters at a time when filmmakers had to use symbols to communicate meaning. The shot of a fireplace has stood-in for this meaning ever since.

 

Still from M, notice the ballon in the upper-left corner of the frame. From Film-Grab Links to an external site.

 

We can even tie this concept back into last week's screening of Fritz Lang's M. Throughout the film, a ballon with the appearance of a figure resides in the background throughout the film. During the "trial" scene, the ballon is seen again with Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in the frame. This blocking in the frame allows the ballon, which closely resembles that of a human figure, to represent the innocent children that Beckert killed bearing witness to his persecution. 

Eugeni also outlines three forms of discourse that films can have. Films can have a persuasive discourse (communicating an ideological message), narrative discourse (communicating a story through fiction or non-fiction forms) and a study of rhetorical figures present in the film (comparing film to unconscious or conscious mental processes).

 

The Kuleshov Effect

This now brings our conversation to the Kuleshov effect. This technique was originated by Lev Kuleshov, who worked at the Soviet Film School as a professor during the Soviet Montage film movement, when icons like Sergei Eisenstien and Dziga Vertov progressed through the program.

Through editing experiments and tests with audiences, Kuleshov discovered that viewers discover more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots rather than that of a single shot in isolation.

 

An illustration of the Kuleshov Effect from masterclass Links to an external site.

 

Using the Kuleshov effect, films can communicate meaning and shots can stand in for a meaning to create a form of language.

On the next page, you'll learn about how the sound-image relationship can represent a relay in Robert Bresson's cinema. 

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