In the early years of YouTube, Wiebe van der Vliet recreated one of cinema’s most famous demonstrations: Lev Kuleshov’s montage experiment from the 1910s. In the original test, the same close-up of an actor’s neutral face was shown repeatedly, each time followed by a different image — a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, a woman on a sofa. Audiences swore the actor’s expression changed: hunger, grief, desire. In fact, the face never changed at all. The experiment revealed that meaning in film does not come from a single shot, but from the cut that joins images together.

Van der Vliet’s reconstruction uploaded to YouTube was deliberately plain, almost anonymous, but the real experiment began after publication. On the social web, meaning is created not only between shots but between people. Comments, reposts, and teaching references became the new “laboratory,” turning a simple reconstruction into a shared resource. Viewers projected hunger, grief, or desire onto the same face, and platforms layered their own context through titles, tags, and misattributions. Some even mistook it for the original Kuleshov footage — a misunderstanding that became part of the work.

'The Proof is in the Comments' is both a faithful remake and a study in how circulation creates meaning. It has since been used widely in classrooms and remains a compact lesson in montage, authorship, and media literacy.