Review by C.J. Bunce
Sometimes seemingly simple questions result in the most surprising answers. What makes film editing work? How does the human eye translate the continuity of a story of moving images as an editor’s cut and splice flips from one character to another, incorporating multiple camera angles, wide shots, close-ups, and other effects? For nearly 150 years humans have been watching movies. What if it hadn’t worked–what if the first time movies were shown in darkened theaters our eyes could not process and intrepret a story from a series of images? The questions all may sound rudimentary, but psychologists, film experts, editors, directors, and researchers didn’t really understand why movies work as a storytelling medium.
In the new documentary The Cinema Within, director Chad Friedrichs (The Experimental City) brought together three-time Oscar winning editor and sound designer Walter Murch (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), psychologists, and researchers around the globe to discuss these questions. Using a study involving people in a remote village in Turkey who have never viewed a film before and the work of a Japanese researcher unrelated to film, they discovered some surprising findings. The answers reside in the blink of an eye.
We often speak in film studies of “moviemaking magic.” Psychologists Dan Levin and Tim J. Smith, along with neuroscientist Jeff Zacks, all have studied the mind, looking toward perception and movies in particular in their research. David Bordwell is a film historian and researcher who has delved into cognitive film theory, and why we understanding the structure of motion picture storytelling. It’s not really about magic, but none of them individually had yet cracked the code behind the movie viewer’s ability to understand the visual narrative of flickering images. Together they explain how film editors use the basics of film editing to tell stories, methods virtually unchanged since the very first silent motion pictures.
The documentary methodically brings the viewer into a complete understanding of why the question is intriguing, using the basics of film editing techniques. One such example is the 180-degree rule, which is how they keep spatial orientation and continuity in telling a story by showing a story as if there is an imaginary line between two characters in a film. The experts participate in clever examples to illustrate how the mind interprets what is on the screen. Footage from movie classics from around the globe is incorporated as the scientists’ works build on each other throughout the film.
But documentarian Friedrichs begins his film discussing the research of Sermin Ildirar, a film researcher at Birkbeck, University of London, who has focused her studies on how people learn to understand film editing. How can we study the question if we can’t examine a test group of people who have never seen a film before? Early on in her research she learned of such a group of people in remote Turkey, an older small population in a mountainous region that avoided technology and had not used electricity or modern technological conveniences. She expected they would watch examples of simple film scenes and understand what was going on. Surprisingly, while many things were intuitive, the back and forth of two people speaking to each other in typical film style did not make sense to them. When one person looked to the right, they said they didn’t know who they were talking to because they couldn’t see who was there. When the scene cut to the right of the person looking left, they didn’t understand these were two people participating in a conversation. So film editing is a learned, not inate, concept. But that’s just the beginning of the exploration.
The best feature includes a segment where the director re-creates an excerpt from a series of lectures from years ago given by Academy Award-winning editor and sound designer Walter Murch (a preserved group of audio recordings something like Dr. Richard Feynman’s lectures of physics). Murch discussed cutting a sequence of Gene Hackman stopping and starting a piece of film within the movie The Conversation. A late night of the repeat work of editing had made Murch foggy, and he became confused at what he was seeing. He went out to take a walk and found a magazine rack that happened to have an article by director John Huston. His focus was about the importance of blinking in editing, and how the blink is used in cutting sequences of film, arguing why he would use a pan in a scene instead of a cut. Decades ago Huston had touched on the seed of the answer of why film works.
Flash across the globe to Tamami Nakano, who has researched and written scholarly papers on blinking. Nakano gained notoriety when she discovered that viewers’ eye blinks synchronized while watching a television show. That is, viewers watching a show will blink at the same time during the show. Nakano’s work reinforced Murch’s idea that film editing scenes mimic the mind’s eye.
How does it all come together? You’ll want to watch to find out. The last bit of their findings involves the incorporation of sound. The more clues and aids an audience is given, the more likely a viewer will be immersed in the experience and understand the connection the movie’s director is trying to make with the audience. The director, whose viewpoint is the same as viewer’s eyes, creates the stories to be understood in the same way the brain uses images, clues, and cues to understand everything around us.
The content is so intriguing you may not notice the clever techniques the documentarian uses to present and edit his own story about editing. It’s all an enlightening look at something we see every day but don’t think about, an eye-opening look at cinema and storytelling presented in a fun and smart way. The findings are truly remarkable and fascinating, and may cause viewers to approach movies in a new light. Don’t miss The Cinema Within from First Run Features, streaming now here on Amazon, and coming to Apple TV and Kanopy May 20, 2025.
