I was still in film school when I first read Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye. It was a great refresher and a timely reminder of the power of motion pictures, as well as the complexity of the moving image presented as cinema — the central idea explored in Chad Freidrichs’ The Cinema Within.
Like Murch’s text, which was largely transcribed from a lecture he gave about film editing, Freidrichs’ documentary focuses on how perception—the way we naturally link images in our minds—and the editing of cinema are possibly interlinked. In one part of the lecture replayed in the film, we hear Murch talk about reading an interview with filmmaker John Huston (The African Queen, The Man Who Would Be King), in which Huston stated that when your eye blinks, transitioning from one object to the next, there lies the “cut.”
Murch then applied this technique throughout his editing process on Coppola’s The Conversation. As he explains, he began seeking the natural places where the blinks — the mind’s splicer — would logically guide the transition from one image to the next. These synchronistic blinks, he claims, are the key to the natural flow of cinema.
What The Cinema Within reveals is that our process of experiencing cinema is connected to our ability to recognize visual stimuli. During our formative years, our minds learn, perceptively, to edit images together—images that might not immediately connect but share commonalities in story or theme. We organize these images in our minds, filling in the gaps and creating a seamless narrative flow.
“…shows us how the way we watch movies is intrinsically connected to how we see and interpret the world.”
This idea is the most thought-provoking element of the film, especially when it aligns with the studies of Sermin Ildirar. Ildirar took visual storytelling to a remote village in Turkey, where the inhabitants had never seen a movie or even had a concept of cinema. Ildirar showed the locals different edited pieces of footage she had shot around their village and asked them to define what they saw.
The results of the study, like the entire documentary, are illuminating and fascinating. They highlight the correlations between how we instinctively see, think, perceive, and edit in our own minds. This influences the type of cinematic storytelling we are drawn to and the strength of the visual tapestry we are presented with. In short, movies have the power to confound the mind and deceive the eye. The truly remarkable aspect of The Cinema Within is that it shows us how the way we watch movies is intrinsically connected to how we see and interpret the world.
The film also exposes the extent to which our enjoyment of films may be tied to how the edited images and other essential elements, such as sound, are cut together. When the montage flows effortlessly, our minds stop paying attention to the cuts. That’s when the “magic” of movies takes over, and we are lost in the story. Whether your visual or cinematic literacy is finely tuned or not, it’s the immersion in the story and characters that ultimately unites us all. After all, that’s the reason people started going to the movies.
"…shows us how the way we watch movies is intrinsically connected to how we see and interpret the world."
