The same blank face reads as hungry, sad, or lustful, depending what follows it

In the 1910s-20s, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov spliced one identical shot of an actor's neutral face together with a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a woman on a divan. Audiences praised the actor's subtle performance, reading hunger, grief, and desire into a face that never once changed. The emotion existed only in the edit.

— Vsevolod Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting — 1929 (recounting Kuleshov's experiment)