You may also want to go direct to the writings of Kuleshov himself in Kuleshov on film : writings by Lev Kuleshov.

Another good book, though may be too general (though i think, from memory, it has a good reading list ) is Film and Video Editing by Roger Crittenden

Another is The technique of film and video editing By Ken Dancyger. It is good to read if you can get one from a library because it talks about modern infulence of tv MTV etc.

I can’t say I have encountered many good books that really evaluate and explore the Kuleshov effect. One book you may want to take a look at is David Cook’s A History of Narrative Film because it has a decent section about the Kuleshov experiment and Russian Montage.

Another book you may wish to look at is Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Film Technique as it explores his ideas concerning editing and how editing is used to guide the viewers perceptions of images on the screen. I wrote a short article introducing the concepts which can be accessed here. However the book is quite hard to fine and expensive if you do, however some anthologies have his important writings in.

For a good background for understanding editing techniques you may wish to read Borwell and Tompson’s Film Art, as chapter 6 is all about the relation of shot to shot and coveres both montage and classical film editing. It also includes a good case study of Hitchcock’s The Birds.

A classic on film editing (from an insider) as a whole is Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. Murch has major credits on the notable films The Conversation, American Graffiti, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (parts II and III), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Ghost, Crumb, Romeo Is Bleeding, First Knight, The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. So I would recommend this book as a source of knowledge about how a film is constructed.

Another book you may want to look at, returning to the Montage style, is Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form. One particular essay in that book, ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, explains his basic (though not easy to read) underlying ideas about cinema and editing. The book is also available from Amazon second-hand for around £6 ($9).

I hope that has been some help. Although you said you were looking for a topic, what things have you been looking at, and what question have you proposed for the paper (or thinking about proposing) ?.