The Kuleshov Effect

I have so much to share now. I still am experimenting the best way to talk about movies. Although nothing will top sharing liquor with siblings in cheap movie theatres in almost an honour to Mystery Science Theatre 3000 as a way to discuss the pellicles, I try to venture on the lonely venues for now. We have to share our knowledge, apparently.
So what I have been doing (and I will get into Laura and Hitchcock eventually) is to see how my mind respond to movies. So on my first reviews I wrote as quick as I finished watching the movies, so the result was an obsession about something in particular. Which made me wonder if the way to write a movie is any ways different from that crude obsession on a specific and minimal subject, and each time you watch the same movie, you will considerer different details. But how could I just rely on this method? As I have been reading on this blog, and sadly not commenting (although I will try to redeem as soon as I finish these words), all my other peers have incredible broad visions about what they have been watching.
I am not sure if they are researching or not (it wouldn’t surprise me if they were) but they sound like serious movie critiques. This is a great thing! But that’s something that I don’t want to myself. And therefore I experiment. And today’s assignment is to talk about a movie that I watched 2 weeks ago (Laura) and then talk about a movie that I watched yesterday and researched about it a little bit (Topaz.) The problem though, I don’t want to do it. I want to damn express my terror and excitement and a mesh mash of mixed feelings that I had with the cut scene from Laura because of the war (as it was praising a bourgeois life while there were soldiers suffering in the fronts.)
How can the absence just one 30-seconds-scene change the mood of an entire movie? I did not read anything related to the production, but I would be happy to know what the director Otto Preminger thought of all of that! Because the exclusion of that mix of “bom vivantnism” made the character Laura look much more evil. IF you take the scene into consideration you know Laura was trained to be that way. But what would that make to a mysterious movie like Laura? We do not know the intention of Laura make the entire film much more velveteen in the original cut because we assume that a natural behaviour similar to Laura’s is meant to be evil. In a sense is an investigation of the human nature. The same behaviour, but with 2 different back ground (one known and the other unknown) changed completely our expectations regarding the characters. It punctuated the film as Laura in all aspects. Everything happened because, for and about her.
Although the main sense of the movie was preserved, any minimal modification could change the film completely! Imagine McPherson being hypnotized by Laura as were all other men. Would she fall in love with him? I guess not. But what would it change about the movie (it could be just one change of scene to convey this entire motif.) Now it is indeed much clearer to me the importance and power of the Kuleshov effect. That brings us to Hitchcock. In few words, he was the most dedicated and obsessed “student” of the Kuleshov. All his movies seem to be an extensive study of the effect, over and over.
Take for instance Topaz (the fresher memory that I have of Hitchcock right now.) It actually has 3 endings. And watching the movie with each of those endings completely chance the feelings of it. By that time, Hitchcock, for most movie critiques, was doing movies for himself. I could see that. That’s why he was not worried in accept doing so many endings. By that, he was testing the Kuleshov till its fullest potential. He was playing with the viewers intentions on the movie. I guess that’s why we could say that “Htichcockies” are comedies. They only refer to perceptions that only make sense when you place then subjectively to the audience, and not an ontological representation of anything. He is making fun of the audience that believe in what he wants them to believe. Hitchcock’s movies are comedies for himself.
I will watch more of those in the following days so I can understand other aspects of everything else. And that makes me wonder how critiques are in such a difficult position that they have to judge what is not in the realm of being judged.