Kuleshov -saying something by saying nothing

One Christmas, as a present, my brother got me a subscription to 'Empire', a British magazine about films. One of the issues delivered had a free book with it, 'The Empire Movie Miscellany'. Recently, I picked it up and read through it, and came across an entry titled 'The Kuleshov Effect'.
This name describes an experiment in film editing carried out by the Russian Filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. In the experiment, Kuleshov showed an image of the expresionless face of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin, and intercut it with shots of a plate of soup, a little girl and an old woman's coffin.
When the film was shown, audiences praised the mastery of the acting, and raved about Mozzhukhin's range, with his ability to display hunger, fatherly love, and grief with such finesse. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about the acting.... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."
Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. However, the implications are much more interesting on a broader scale. The experiment worked because viewers brought their own emotional reactions to the sequence of images, and then 'projected' their own assumptions and emotions onto the actor. Mozzukhin's blank expression became a blank canvas on which viewers could not help painting over with their own subconscious feelings. In short, then, we have another in a long line of examples of people assuming, instead of verifying, and so, the next opportunity for misinterpretation arises.
Everybody who is interested in communication knows about Professor Albert Mehrabian and his statistic regarding message transmissions. Essentially, Professor Mehrabian found that

• 7% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in the words that are spoken.
• 38% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said).
• 55% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in facial expression.

While his findings relate only to emotions and feelings (as perfectly illustrated by Kuleshov's experiment), it is worth remembering that very often, more information is transmitted non-verbally than verbally. This is why we never see a country's President giving a 'state of the nation' speech in front of a burning car crash. A lot can be passed across (or, on the other hand, not) when the speaker allows the audience to assume. Of course, this may also be a good thing -the state of the nation may be that of a burning car crash!
When we want to deliver a message, we have to decide if we want to do it explicitly, in which case there is no doubt what we are communicating, or implicitly, allowing the audience to make its own conclusions. A student of mine told me of a case where she wanted to help a client who had asked for the e-mail address of her supervisor. She explained that she could not give out the e-mail address of John Smith, her supervisor at company, but the client could e-mail her at her address, which was the standard format of e-mail addresses for everyone in that company: Jane.Jones@company.com. The client, sounding offended, told her he was sorry she couldn't ooperate. Sometimes, we just have to hope our audience is clever enough to make assumptions.