Ivan Mozzhukhin

Strapping star of the Czarist era who fled Russia in the wake of the Revolution and eventually settled in Paris, where his enigmatic presence made him a popular performer of French silents. One of Mozhukhin's tangential contributions to cinema history is as the subject of the "Kuleshov effect": Kuleshov used one repeated shot of the actor, interspersed with footage of crying babies, plates of food, etc., to demonstrate that the same individual image (Mozhukhin's face) could take on different meanings and different emotional charges depending on its filmic context.