Publication of Peer Reviewed Journal Piece: Full Metal Kuleshov Effect | Prof. Travis Wilkerson

Research Statement

US films about the “Vietnam War," itself a strangely reductive term that obliterates two of the three countries, express a principal, recurring limitation. This limitation extends from Hollywood films, to independent films, to documentaries. The limitation is point-of-view. Overwhelmingly, US films place the US experience at the center of the war. Though the war was neo-colonial in character, they tend to express a colonial outlook that is both deeply problematic and also limits them as artistic works. Again and again, US films miss the forest for the trees. 

The best critical text is found not in cinema but literature, as described in the critical writing of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe in his famous essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,'" published in 1977. Three passages from that astonishing essay best articulate his position:

Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? (Achebe 1977, 788).

Quite simply it is the desire -- one might indeed say the need -- in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest (Achebe 1977, 783).

Here Achebe poses a principal question, in direct reply to the principal limitation: 

And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.

Now, I do not quote that essay in Full Metal Kuleshov Effect. And of course Vietnam is not Africa and a film is not a novel. But this essay was the key critical orientation and starting point for my videographic work on films of the Vietnam War, aimed at addressing a number of central, existential issues. 

And is it simply coincidental that Apocalypse Now, the most celebrated US film about the war, is an adaptation of the very novel Achebe was responding to? Surely Chinua Achebe is on to something big and important that is relevant here too. His is a crucial critical framework. 

To what extent do US films about the Vietnam War operate in the same manner as European novels about the colonization of Africa and Asia? To what extent do they reinforce this same colonial outlook in the very structures of their narratives, their imagery and sound, their editing and montage? To what extent are they self preoccupied? To what extent does this lead to racism, misogyny? To what extent do they make any effort whatsoever to overcome these limitations? 

But, perhaps most importantly, what are the alternatives? How might we first interrogate these limitations and then discover strategies to transcend or overcome them? Are there artists who did so? And if so, how? 

As mentioned earlier, there is a body of academic work on some aspects of these questions. But the challenges of existing works are two-fold. First, they are often so preoccupied with the US vision that they, paradoxically, reinforce the same centrality of that vision as described by Achebe. In a sense, while interrogating the fundamentally problematic nature of that vision, they never quite shatter the mirror they intend to critique. And this is because they rarely seek to counterpose meaningful alternatives. This makes sense: the US films are widely disseminated, broadly discussed, celebrated, criticized, regarded and diminished. But the alternatives, coming from the Global South, especially Vietnam itself, remain overwhelmingly marginalized. In any meaningful critical and curatorial sense, they are regarded as secondary, as footnotes, as lesser works or even historical curiosities, when not simply ignored altogether.  

Early in this essay, there is an excerpt of a lecture by Jean Luc Godard, in which Stanley Kubrick’s film is counterposed with the work of the radical Cuban documentarist Santiago Alvarez. This gesture on Godard’s part, a filmmaker of overwhelming international stature, is immense. The lecture proposes the direction truly critical work must take. First, critical interrogation. Next, critical counterposition. Following Achebe’s essay, this lecture provides the most important context and path for this videographic work. 

But the lecture by Godard also calls to mind the second contextual jumping off point for this work: the relatively limited videographic work deeply interrogating films about the Vietnam War. This reflects the age of the films, their diminishing position and stature. But, of course, it also reflects certain limitations within the field itself. The tendency to prioritize expressions of cinephilia, for example, as opposed to thoroughgoing critique. But the void creates an enormous opportunity. Videographic work can make visible what was hitherto marginalized. It can equalize things that, in any other context, are vastly asymmetrical. Films about Vietnam, for example, by US filmmakers, versus films about that war by Vietnamese filmmakers themselves. Indeed, Godard’s own versions of videographic work, his Histoire(s) du cinéma, make limited reference to the work of Santiago Alvarez and none at all to Vietnamese filmmakers, though US filmmakers, across the gamut of subjects and genres, are explored at length.  

This work is but one of many forms of exploration around these issues within my own critical and creative practice. My father was a decorated US helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War. A great portion of my childhood was spent discussing and exploring his experiences in that war, and the subsequent consequences for him, for my family, and for Vietnam itself. Indeed, in the 1990’s he returned to Vietnam as a physician, treating patients suffering from the consequences of Agent Orange exposure and Unexploded Ordinances. I should note here, his own eventual death was also caused by exposure during the war to Agent Orange. 

For me, this legacy has manifested itself through a series of creative and critical works within my own field. As a practitioner, my first film, Accelerated Underdevelopment: In the Idiom of Santiago Alvarez, dealt with the cinematic legacy of Santiago Alvarez, who first interested me in large part because of his works about the Vietnam War, including the very film discussed by Godard in his lecture, 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh.  Eventually, I dealt with my father’s experiences in the war more directly in a film called Distinguished Flying Cross. 

More recently, as a film professor, I have begun exploring videographic criticism as a tool to deepen this engagement in a more scholarly context. Full Metal Kuleshov Effect is but the first in a larger projected series of such works, counterposing US works about the war with those from Global South filmmakers and artists, both during and after the war. 

I should add that I now live and teach in China. This, undoubtedly, has sharpened my interest in Western depictions of East Asia, and altered my manner of seeing and speaking about these things. In that sense too, this will likely be an ongoing endeavor, likely to take many creative and critical forms. 

The starting methodological framework for this essay is the utilization of variations of the so-called Kuleshov Effect, as an interrogatory tool. In fact, this utilisation is not a precise deployment of that strategy in the commonly held classical sense, but rather, more a disruptive, subversive, and somewhat rhetorical one. 

The original Kuleshov Effect, as widely conceived and understood, was rooted in silent cinema, and meant to explore the parameters and qualitative effect of juxtaposing two images, with radical distance between them, to explore what effect this had on the viewer’s reading of the original image. The original image, as classically described, was a neutral face, and the subsequent images included both a bowl of soup and a woman in a coffin. The intent was to explore whether the viewer would read the neutral face differently — as hungry, or despairing, for example — based on the subsequent or preceding image. The answer, as it turned out, was both yes and no. The Kuleshov Effect proved to be highly image and case specific. 

It is now roughly a century since those initial experiments, and of course much has changed in the cinema, in the use of sound, in montage, in visual and filmic literacy. The world has been utterly transformed, in countless ways. Perhaps even more importantly, scholarship has shown that this conception of the Kuleshov Effect was itself limited by a confluence of lost documents, confused details, mistranslations, and numerous other factors.

In “The Geocultural Provenance of Narratives: The Case of the Kuleshov Effect,” Anna Kolesnikov (2020, 57) writes that “...when it comes to the Kuleshov effect, our understanding of its genesis, evolution, and reworking as a narrative is oddly incomplete. When we talk about the Kuleshov effect, do we refer to Kuleshov’s description of the experiment or the description of Pudovkin, his prodigal student? Furthermore, Kuleshov made several pioneering film experiments; why did the one involving Mozzhukhin become preeminent, and how did it garner worldwide fame?”

In some ways, Kolesnikov is suggesting something about the politics of naming. An excellent recent videographic essay is worth mentioning here, “After the Facts” by Karen Pearlman (2020). At the core of the video essay is the basic and urgent observation that the so-called “Kuleshov Effect” was actually the work of a vibrant group of female editors, whose innovations were simply described by Kuleshov.

But this isn’t simply a matter of credit or misattribution. It also falsely defines what the Kuleshov Effect actually is. Importantly, she adds: “Exploring alternative versions of the experiment may be valuable for a better understanding of what the Kuleshov effect could be" (75).

So, misattribution and miscommunication aside, what exactly is the Kuleshov Effect anyway? Perhaps the best simple definition was offered by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (2017, 226) who define the Kuleshov Effect as the “cutting together portions of a space in a way that prompts the spectator to assume a spatial whole that isn’t shown onscreen.”

In later interviews, Kuleshov’s own definitions align well with this interpretation. “And so I realized that if you combine one shot with another shot, or one shot with two other shots, then you get not only that which is . . . depicted . . . in each of those shots, but something new . . . that, which is not in those shots . . . that, which does not exist” (Kolesnikov 2020, 66-67). The Kuleshov Effect utterly transforms the original images. It creates another image altogether. 

He continues: “Through the association of montage these shots acquired different meanings. The performances of the actor on the screen became different. From two images a new concept, a new form, not present [in the two images]—the birth of a third [entity]. The discovery stunned me.”

This very language provoked one of the key formal tactics in my essay, common in the videographic essay, but not typically utilized in explorations of the Kuleshov Effect: the multi-screen. Nothing in either Kuleshov’s own articulations or Thompson and Bordwell’s definition makes explicit that the images must follow one another in a linear sequence. Their definitions simply describe the synthesis of two images into a “spatial whole,” a “third entity.” So how might the simultaneous presence of two images on screen alter that “spatial whole,” or amplify and accelerate the creation of the “third entity?” Does it hinder the birth of the “third entity” or bring it into existence at breakneck speed? 

But multiscreen notwithstanding, it is this “spatial whole” or “third entity” that lies at the heart of my essay. What are the limits of this effect? What might this “third entity” be? Does this "spatial whole”  have social possibilities? Does it have political possibilities? 

Entering the hot house of Vietnam War films in particular, what are the conceptual limits of this effect? If two separate images combine to create a “third entity,” what happens when each of those images comes from an utterly different trajectory? When one image comes from a Hollywood film and another from, say, a radical Cuban documentary? How about a film made by a Vietnamese filmmaker not decades after the war, but while the bombs are falling? Surely these facts alter the nature of the “third entity.” Indeed, when these clashing subjectivities come from key documents from the movement known as the “Third Cinema,” does this “third entity” amplify into a “third cinema entity?” I would argue that the results of this experiment suggest yes. 

Again, the heart of the matter would seem to be the clashing of subjectivities. If the principal images are those of US suffering, for example, what happens when those images are surrounded by images of Vietnamese suffering? What happens to those same images when surrounded by Vietnamese resistance? If the original, limited, dominant conception of the Kuleshov Effect builds much of its meaning out of “subjective” images (the face) being combined with an “objective” image (the bowl of soup, for example), how does this expansive view of the Kuleshov Effect operate when the “third entity” is the synthesis of radically opposed “subjectivities," particularly when coexisting in the same screen space, at the same time? Does one take precedence? Does the “third entity” assert itself with unusual force? 

Where all this becomes most disruptive and subversive is the final sequence, in which the images of US suffering are surrounded by the images of a Vietnamese child whose world has been destroyed by US violence. My point is that US films not only fail to encompass the perspective of the Vietnamese but indeed negate it altogether. And, had they not done that, they would have operated not just as more humanistic, more progressive documents, but better cinema too. The “third cinema entity” is better cinema, plain and simple, than a limited subjectivity born of imperial dominance and cultural blindness. 

It also becomes disruptive in the sense that it tries not simply to counterpose a Vietnamese perspective, but also to elevate the awareness of the Vietnamese film, The Little Girl of Hanoi, itself. It is an attempt to intervene on behalf of a neglected artist, in hopes of reimagining the cinematic canon itself, which remains an urgent necessity. 

Full Metal Kuleshov Effect expresses itself in videographic terms, which heighten and amplify an understanding of the limitations of Full Metal Jacket. To some extent this is simply an extension of the large body of criticism around these issues (Comber & O'Brien, 1988; Rasmussen & Downey, 2009; Woodman, 2003), but the videographic form, its tactics and language, do a great deal to make things more visible, more conspicuous, and therefore more urgently problematic. It does not simply describe, but it illustrates, in cinematic language, the quantity and quality of these problematics. Where it forges especially significant new ground is in the realm of counter-position, it builds upon, deepens, and illustrates the impulse expressed in the Godard lecture. It shows the lack of inevitability of the perspective of the Kubrick film and even points to an essential observation - that better models already  existed before the Kubrick film. Had he possessed the humility to look to filmmakers from the Global South instead of, for example, Sam Peckinpah, his own film would have been far better. But the true value of this videographic essay, its real significance, is the elevation of The Little Girl of Hanoi to its proper place in the cinematic canon, as an essential, astonishing, unparalleled work of cinematic art, made under the most difficult of circumstances imaginable.  

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa.” The Massachusetts Review 18, no. 4 (Winter, 1977), pp. 782-794.

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. 2017. Film Art: An Introduction, 11th ed. New York: McGraw Hill Education.

Comber, Michael and Margaret O'Brien. "Evading the War: the Politics of the Hollywood Vietnam film." History 73, no. 238 (June 1988), pp. 248-260. 

Kolesnikov, Anna. 2020. “The Geocultural Provenance of Narratives: The Case of the Kuleshov Effect.” Film History 32, no. 2 (Summer 2020), pp. 55-79.

Rasmussen, Karen and Sharon D. Downey. 2009. "Dialectical disorientation in Vietnam War films: Subversion of the mythology of war." Quarterly Journal of Speeech 77, iss. 2 (1991), pp. 176-195. 

Woodman, B.J. 2003. "A Hollywood War of Wills: Cinematic Representation of Vietnamese Super-Soldiers and America’s Defeat in the War." Journal of Film and Video 55, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2003), 44-58.

Full Metal Jacket. (1987). Stanley Kubrick, USA.

79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh (1969). Santiago Alvarez, Cuba.

The Little Girl of Hanoi (1974). Hai Ninh, Vietnam.

Accelerated Underdevelopment: In the Idiom of Santiago Alvarez (1999). Travis Wilkerson, USA.

Distinguished Flying Cross (2011). Travis Wilkerson, USA.

Une lecon: de critique visual (1987). Jean-Luc Godard, France. Online at https://vimeo.com/12473231. 

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows.

Review 1: Invite resubmission with major revisions of practical work and/or written statement.

This video essay offers a provocative interrogation of the ‘canon’ of films about war in Southeast Asia as represented here by Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). Taking a lecture by Godard as it’s starting point the video essay uses montage and split screen to seek to reveal the film’s ‘racist, sexist, neo-colonial discourse’ when played against/alongside 79 Springtimes by Santiago Alvarez (1968) and Little Girl of Hanoi by Hai Ninh (1974). The overall effect is quite devastating, with the affective edit accompanied by a well-pitched, economical voice over.

There is much to admire in the editing and construction of this video essay, but within the form of this work, I do question how it employs the term ‘Kuleshov Effect’. The video essay builds its argument around 3 ‘Full Metal Kuleshov Effects’; but only the 2nd iteration, which plays Full Metal Jacket against itself, is a sequential edit (albeit a split screen one) which invokes the tenets of the Kuleshov Effect. The split screen is used very effectively in the other 2 examples to bring Full Metal Jacket into a dialogue with the films of Santiago Alvarez and Hai Ninh, but this dialogue is much more in keeping with Godard’s (2022) own experimental ambition to “put little pieces of film beside each other” rather than as exemplars of the Kuleshov Effect. I should point out that I greatly admire the skill with which the split screen has been used here, in particular in the 1st of the effects which reflects on the different ways in which slow motion has been employed by Kubrick and Santiago Alvarez. Here the split screen effectively creates a number of eyeline matches, highlighting in a way, that which is ‘missing’ in Kubrick’s work..

The accompanying written statement is a well conceived rationale for this project, giving a context for this work, and noting future explorations using the video essay form. In light of my thoughts about the video essay itself I would perhaps wish for a more theoretically grounded statement, making clear the links between the evocation of practice and the research which informs it. Perhaps in this case, and in light of my comments, the statement might explore in some more detail the effect which it is seeking to invoke here, and perhaps how this work engages with the video essay form?

This is an enticing work of videographic criticism, but in its current form I’m not sure it necessarily follows its own internal logic or the ambitions of its maker. Given that this is stated as being the start of a larger project I wonder if it might be worth waiting to publish a broader sample of the work when it is complete?.

Godard, Jean-Luc. 2018. Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television. Montreal: Caboose

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

Full Metal Kuleshov Effect is the first in a planned series of video essays by the author interrogating screen representations of the wars in Southeast Asia, focusing on the “neo-colonial gaze, racism, sexism, and cultural Imperialism” of Hollywood films like Full Metal Jacket, and amplifying neglected works on the subject by the Cuban and Vietnamese filmmakers Santiago Alvarez and Hai Ninh.

The triangulation of American, Cuban and Vietnamese perspectives on the war in the video essay is an interesting and original approach, inspired by the author’s impressive previous research on Alvarez and the Vietnam war, and building on Godard’s comparison between Alvarez and Kubrick’s films.

In the supporting research statement, the author breaks the video essay down into three parts. The first section of the film works well, expanding on Godard’s comparison but part two consists of the three scenes with Vietnamese actors in Full Metal Jacket without additional context and feels a little sparse. The use of split-screen and intercutting of Full Metal Jacket and Little Girl of Hanoi in part three works well to shift the point of view from the US soldiers to the Vietnamese sniper and Ngoc Ha, the little girl in Hanoi searching for her father in the devastated wartime landscape.

Little Girl of Hanoi was shot during the Christmas bombings of late 1972, which serves to highlight the artificiality of the abandoned bombed-out buildings on Kubrick’s film sets in Beckton, East London and call to mind more subversive American films like Medium Cool. The anger of local villagers at the American prisoners of war works very effectively in counterpoint to Full Metal Jacket but a deeper analysis of the production context for all three films featured in the video essay would be helpful in the supporting research statement.

The first half of the statement provides the research context for the video essay but feels a little too anecdotal and peripheral to the claims made in the film. The relevance of the title to the work could also be expanded upon, as it’s not referred to in the film or text. German films are mentioned but not cited, and the author’s shock at the “racist, chauvinist, misogynist, and markedly neo-colonial” US films on the war seems to gloss over the substantial body of critical writing on this subject, which should be acknowledged in some way in the text and bibliography, particularly the existing discourse around Full Metal Jacket.

On the Vimeo link, the filmmaker notes that “the edit is complete but the voiceover and sound mix are still temp.” Will this change before publication? There are also a couple of typos (“such a project”) and a duplicate full stop in the penultimate paragraph.

For more information, please visit: