The inevitable day eventually comes in film school in which one learns the famed and much-debated Kuleshov Effect. It basically goes like this: In the 1910s and 20s, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted a series of experiments in which he used a shot of a person’s expressionless face and juxtaposed it with a series of other images, going back to the same expression on the same face, then to another image. A bowl of soup. A little girl. A child-size coffin. Each of these were juxtaposed with the same footage of the same blank face, yet each time the expression on the face appears different by the act of juxtaposition alone: when the face was juxtaposed with the bowl of soup, audiences concluded that the person was hungry, and when the face was juxtaposed with the coffin, audiences got the impression that the face was sad or in mourning. But the face was, in fact, the same throughout. The impression of difference was audience inference based on the juxtaposition, a projection predicated upon what the subjectivity of the audience member carries with them. The same face. Different images following it. Different meanings derived from each juxtaposition. The conclusion of the experiment was that juxtaposition creates meaning that doesn’t exist in either image alone. A face is a face. A bowl is a bowl. But together, they represent an emotion or an idea. I can’t help but think of the experiment when watching Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, The Passion of [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

This week’s Culture Warrior explains how Tarantino’s latest has matured the filmmaker beyond simple homage to cinema’s past and instead displays a reverence to the overall potential power movies have to offer, rooted in the sacred experience of the movie theater.