The Cinema Within (2024) Movie Script
Everything was
deeply surprising to me.
Because I was so fond of films
how they engage us.
But you do experiments
not just to say,
"yes, I was right."
They didn't understand
why I was doing this.
But they were
watching and trying to
understand what
they were seeing.
And it was just like in
the early days of cinema.
It's an evolutionary
novel thing.
Eyes have been around on this
planet for around 400 million years.
And in none of that
time was it ever the case
that you took what was
presented to that eyeball
and instantaneously replaced it
with something totally different.
Until the advent of film.
The audience was baffled
by this new modern contrivance
and they came to
look and to marvel.
And most of the time
when you take a
perceptual- or motor-system
outside of its normal
range of operation,
things go south.
Things explode.
So this is what
could have happened:
You're looking at a shot of
a train arriving at the station.
And there's a cut
to a completely different shot.
And it's conceivable, given
the nature of the human brain,
that the whole audience
gets seasick and throws up.
And idea of motion pictures
would have died at that point.
Just like the fact that we get
seasick on an ocean voyage,
a cut from one shot to another
could have had that same
completely disorienting result.
Because what youre looking at is a
violent disruption of physical reality.
Instantaneously, one
picture is replaced by another
and nothing in our day-to-day
experience mirrors that.
Which is why when
cinema first emerged,
the camera was put on a tripod
and you filmed
the scene in front
and you minimized the changes
from one perspective to another
because it was believed that it
would be jarring to the viewers.
A few years into
the 20th Century,
that assumption is gone.
Filmmakers realized
that actually, I can cut
viewers perfectly understand it.
And from that moment,
cinema took off.
I think that early filmmakers
had an intuition about what
their audience would understand.
That I can show
you something here
and then there,
and then you can connect
these shots together
in a story.
I think this is the
magic of films,
how they make us
live in the storyworld.
But the mysterious
fact is that edits work,
cuts do work we
know they work.
So the paradox that Im setting
in the middle of the floor
for you here is very simple.
Why do they work?
Sermin, how did you get
involved with these experiments
on the psychology
of continuity editing?
I studied film and after graduation I
worked on film sets, in productions,
and gradually I stepped up
to a script supervising role
and I became
obsessed with continuity.
Because most films
actually are not made
like you watch them
you watch the
edited version of it.
But on a film set, we shoot all
the actions from one camera angle
and then the same action
from another camera angle.
We shoot them again and
again from different angles,
and sometimes we
shoot an actor on one day
and sometimes we
shoot an actor on one day
and then shoot the other
actor on another day,
And then the editor will
cut the shots together
to give the audience an impression
that they were there at the same time,
at the same place.
This is called
continuity editing.
And I was really fascinated
with these techniques.
So I decided to go
back back to university
to find out how it works.
In those first few
years of cinema,
filmmakers quickly discovered
that we've really
got something here.
The editing of moving images
is the one thing that you
can't do in another art form.
And there's nothing
in a single shot
that corresponds to what
you can do with a cut.
Editing can control
very exactly what
the spectator sees.
Look at this.
Look at that.
Pay attention to this.
Or someone leaves
Cut
They come in another door
Okay, I understand.
They walked through the door.
Pretty basic, pretty primal.
But it took people
a while to figure out
the best ways to do this.
But gradually, this
all kind of crystallized
around the end of the 1910s
into a standardized style.
The continuity system.
Which is a set of choices
for how the whole scene
should flow together.
It flows through space,
it flows through time.
Just quietly steering
the viewer's eye
around the scene.
And these techniques were quickly
comprehended around the world.
People got it, people
understood the continuity system.
And by the 1920s,
most filmmakers are
using continuity techniques
all the way through their films.
It's the way they think
of making the movie.
And even today?
Of course, today. Of course.
That's one of the most fascinating
things about the continuity system
Why?
Inside we have
moving pictures...
The Lumiere Brothers
had invented the movies...
Wind the tape back,
to the beginning
and cinema could have
gone a lot of different ways.
Why do we have what
we have? is the question.
It's just so surprising.
This small set of techniques
that were developed over
a period of 10 or 12 years
still form the basis for
cutting together a scene.
But one of the fascinating
things about early cinema:
it put filmmakers in the position
of being amateur psychologists.
Through this series of
informal experiments
cutting scenes together
in different ways.
Filmmakers developed
this really interesting intuition
about the perceptual process.
And that is: a substantial
proportion of time
people don't notice the edits.
And the hardest edits to detect
are called match action edits.
Where action in one shot
continues across the edit.
Creating this
illusion of continuity
between shots.
Alas
I cannot claim this
next feat as illusion.
And so in the process
of developing cinema
filmmakers plugged into
something deep about us
at a perceptual level.
Watch carefully.
And created an art form
that's almost
effortless to understand.
Youll see no trickery...
Around the world, we all
have the same film language
the continuity
editing techniques.
Which seem so natural that
even without any experience
we can make sense of them.
And when I went
back to university,
I was introduced to
cognitive film theory,
which I loved.
And learned about
all these psychologists
claiming that continuity editing
corresponds to
real-life perception.
For me, as a scientist
interested in perception,
the fact that continuity
editing works so well
and is so persistent
and so dominant
and is often totally
invisible to people.
Suggests that there's
something going on in these edits
that's shaped
to our natural
mechanisms of vision.
And I was sure they
knew what they were doing.
So I was supporting the
continuity editing rules.
They make sense so easily
because they're exploiting the
ways of seeing we already have.
And so I personally
think it tells us a lot about
the way humans see the world
that's what the style is.
So for my Ph.D.,
I was very excited to
research this question:
If people understand
these editing techniques
as easily as real life.
I think that was crucial for the
development of early cinema.
Because it really had to
be a form of communication
that people could understand
without a lot of learning.
Find me somebody
who had to spend years
to understand the movies.
You don't see it.
And the best way of testing
this unanswered question
is to find adults who have
never seen films before
which seems very
impossible in this era.
But this is also when
I met a journalist
who told me about these people
living in a remote
part of Turkey.
He told me that they were
so amazed to see a car.
So I thought, I must
find these people.
If they haven't
seen a car before,
maybe they havent
seen a film before as well.
I was invited to give a
series of lectures in Australia
back in the late 1980s.
And one of them was recorded.
This is Tape 2 of Walter Murch
speaking in October of 1988,
subject is editing,
continuation.
And eventually, a transcription of
that tape was published as a book.
In the Blink of an Eye: a
Perspective on Film Editing"
So the book, In
the Blink of an Eye
is one of those lectures.
At the beginning
of the last session
I deposited this question
in the middle of the floor:
why do cuts work?
We all know that they do.
And yet when you think about
it, it's surprising that they do
because of what's
actually taking place.
With anything like this, if you
look at it and try to come up
with some reasons for it, the
first areas that you look at is:
are there any human
equivalents to this?
Can we find any junction points
between our own experience
and what we have in film?
Or is the cut a purely arbitrary invention
that people have just gotten used to?
I first began to get
a glimmer of this
when I was cutting
The Conversation.
The Conversation was the
first feature film that I'd ever edited.
So there were many late nights.
And sometimes I
would look at a shot
of Harry Caul working
his tape recorder
and Gene Hackman, the
actor, would hit the stop button
on his machine.
And I would be amazed
to see that the KEM,
the machine that I was
using to edit, kept moving.
Because I thought,
Well, he stopped it. My
machine should stop also.
But it didn't. So
then I would realize,
Oh, I'm very
sleepy and that's why
I'm having this experience.
So I think I'd been
working all night.
I'd be looking at a
closeup of Gene Hackman,
and I would pick a point
to cut out of the shot.
And what I would do
is try to think about what
the audience was thinking about,
which is also to try
to think what the actor
or the character
is thinking about.
So I'm just looking at a shot,
trying to get into
the character's head.
And you have to feel that moment
that says,
Cut!
So I made a deliberate but
largely unconscious decision
to cut here.
Mark that frame.
Okay.
Let me try it again.
You rewind.
Play the shot again.
Feel the same thing,
kind of a rising pressure.
And now.
What I kept finding
was that the point where I said,
that's enough of this closeup.
Right around there,
within some close proximity
Gene Hackman blinked.
And it happened often enough
that I began to wonder
what was going on here.
So Tim: Can you give me a
very simple and clear example
of how a continuity editing technique
mimics our natural perception?
Can I do a demo?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay.
Ill just test it first.
One of the most interesting
things about visual perception
is just how
counterintuitive it is.
So, for example, it's
really hard to appreciate
the degree to which
looking at one thing,
sacrifices awareness of
things you're not looking at.
Because it kind of feels like
as you're looking around a room,
what you have is
something like a picture
that's high resolution
throughout the visual field.
But in fact, thats not
really what you have.
Because when the
light comes into the eye,
the area that is most in focus
is roughly equivalent to
your thumbnail at arm's length.
And as you move
out into the periphery
very rapidly, it just becomes
a blobby, colorful blur.
You move it, you can
see it perfectly fine,
but you couldn't see how many
creases there are in your knuckle.
But that is not a limitation.
That is an
evolutionary efficiency.
Because what it enables us to do
is represent in incredible detail that
which we think is going to be relevant
by moving our eyes
around a scene.
So we're constantly trying to
extract cues from the environment
about where to look next.
And one really valuable
cue for figuring out
where to look next is eye gaze.
So if I look over there...
Your natural tendency
is to ask yourself a question,
What are they looking at?
And then you want to see
the target of their gaze.
So if you see someone in a
medium shot looking a certain way,
you're automatically
assuming that theres something
outside that frame
that they're looking at.
And when the next shot
shows you something
that confirms that possibility,
say, another person looking
in the opposite direction.
We intuitively understand these
spaces are next to each other.
So the eyeline match
can override the fact that
you're breaking up the space
and not showing X and
Y in the same frame.
So this kind of editing really
is such a powerful device
because the spectator
builds the scene up
in her or his head.
And it seems to be tapping
into some human capacities
that are built into the
way we see in the world.
In the 1970s, when the
Turkish state was bringing
some electricity
to these mountains,
they built villages
down the hills
and they invited people to
move to these new houses
without any cost.
But some people
didn't want to move in.
Some of them
wanted to stay there
on top of mountains.
So they didn't have
electricity for a very long time.
These are the ones that
didn't have any television at all
and had never been exposed
to any form of films before.
I think laughing and smiling was
the most common first reaction.
It was fun for them,
a joy that you would see in
a kid's eyes when
they see a new toy.
The first films they've seen
in their entire life.
I wish I could have
made them better,
but they were
very amateur films.
I think in the early
days of cinema,
the most important discovery
was cutting on action.
It's like the magic
which makes the cuts disappear.
Even for very
experienced viewers.
So I was very
excited to see that
match-on-action
cut works perfectly
with first-time adult
viewers as well.
They could connect
the shots together
and maybe they didn't
even notice the cut.
If someone looks up,
then you would look
where he is looking at.
And it's the same
thing with eyeline match.
And all the inexperienced
viewers understood.
And, of course
shot-reverse shots can also
be interpreted as eyeline match.
It seems so natural.
This was what I thought.
This was not what
I was expecting.
But they said,
One of them came.
He went.
And then the other one came.
So when they were not
able to see him anymore
he has disappeared.
So then I wondered if
over-the-shoulder shots
might help to
connect them together.
Because you see a
part of the other person,
so they're not
disappearing theyre there.
but they still
couldn't understand it
as two people at the same
time, at the same place.
And after five
participants said,
Hes gone
and another one comes.
I thought, Very surprising.
Sometimes when you're working,
especially with something
that you love doing,
you lose a sense of time.
So it was about
5:00 in the morning
and I walked out to
get some breakfast
and I walked past
the Christian Science Bookstore.
And they had the opening page
of the Christian Science Monitor
with an interview with
fim director John Huston.
And he was talking
about his film experience
and, as an example of some
other point he was making,
he was attacking the use
of the pan as a point of view.
As a rule, the camera's
the protagonist.
You enter the scene
through the camera's eyes.
And when would I want the pan?
Only when that
intervening space,
the relationship
between those objects,
one on one side of the room,
and the other on the other,
is important.
If it isn't important, you cut.
And so what you're doing when
you walk into the room and pan,
which is to say
somebody comes into the
room, there's a party going on,
the person comes
into the room and
that happens.
But it isn't like reality.
Do that sometime, he said.
Come into a room
and get hit with a new scene
and you will not do
that.
What you'll do is:
That,
that, that and that.
That the head moves
and it stops momentarily,
takes a picture
and then moves again,
takes another picture.
And he said Huston
It has a physiological function,
the camera.
For instance, let's take the cut
And the
psychology of the cut,
The physiology of the cut.
Try this little trick yourself.
Look at that lamp in
one corner of the room.
It's extreme left.
And now look back
here, at this lamp.
You've done a
complete right angle.
Right. Now do it again
Now do it once more.
You notice, doing that,
you blink your eyes.
Right. You blank it out.
Because there's no
point in viewing all this
to come over here.
That's a cut.
I see.
Look what happens to the eye.
There is a lowering
of the eyelids
at the point of movement.
That is the blink
and the blink is the cut.
The blink is the cut.
That lodged in my brain.
Because as the eyes
move, what you want to do
is bring these two
images together.
That's what a cut is.
That's what a cut does.
Once that idea emerged
from the shrubbery,
I just began to watch people.
And what I began to sense
was that I was seeing something
that was not what they tell
you in the biology textbooks.
I always monitored other people's
blinking behavior on the train.
and check when and
how often they blink.
In Japan, is it considered polite to
stare at others, watching their blinks?
We seldom stare at
people, especially in the train.
So, it made people feel
nervous and uncomfortable.
It's quite strange
why human beings
generate so much blinking.
Most people think that we
blink to moisturize our eyeballs.
But, on average, we
generate 20 blinks per minute,
more than five times
necessary for ocular lubrication.
I thought, we have a reason
to generate so many blinks.
So I started to monitor
blinking behavior
while people watched
the same video.
I utilized Mr. Bean, which
is a famous British comedy.
And I found that the blink rate
showed a large decrease.
Because the viewers have
to pay a lot of attention.
But unexpectedly, I also noticed
a surprising phenomenon.
The timing of blinks
tended to show
strong synchronization.
So audiences blinks
are synchronized to the movie.
But interestingly, the degree
of blink synchronization
is the strongest
for the first viewing.
By the third viewing,
it is quite boring.
Because the viewers
know what will happen.
So I realized that blinking
might be a clue to how
the viewers process
or understand the story.
One of the things you
notice when you watch films
is that people look
straight at each other,
even stare at each other
and don't blink.
For the sake of drama.
No surprise there, right?
Filmmakers want people
to watch films intently.
And if we see people
looking at each other intently,
humans pay attention.
That is a heightening,
a ratcheting up,
of an already existing tendency.
And one way to think
about the continuity style
is that the tendencies
that we have
are tapped and
enhanced and amplified
by the film technique.
For instance, when two characters
are advancing towards each other,
if one character is
moving from
left-to-right in one shot
then the other should be
moving right-to-left in the next.
And that's intuitively
obvious because
we can't instantly jump
to the other side
and see them going in
the opposite direction.
And so in terms of the
space represented for a scene,
the way that this
gets thought about
is through a so-called
180-degree system.
Which allows you to cut
to pretty much any point
on one side of the action.
And it seems to build out
from our perceptual inclinations.
So you can then enjoy the
scene of outrageous violence
because you already
understand what's going on.
When you first start
thinking about editing,
you think, Wow,
how can people make
sense of all this stuff?
Because there's nothing that's as
jumpy and disrupted and interrupted
as a whole bunch of film edits.
With one exception.
Because only a small part of
our visual field is high resolution.
Weve got to keep moving
our eyes around all the time
to update what's
going on at that point.
Each of those movements
is called a saccade.
And they're very fast
ballistic movements
and happen about
three times a second.
And when your eyeball
is moving fast like that,
it's essentially useless.
You're getting this
kind of whoosh.
This smeared
blur of information.
And that's not information
your brain can use.
So your brain actually
shuts down that input.
So that you're effectively blind
while that saccade is happening.
In addition to that,
we blink every 2 or 3 seconds.
So between blinks and saccades
were functionally blind
a third of our waking lives,
which I find totally
bizarre and threatening.
It is quite surprising when
you start breaking down
how much of our
everyday experience
is inaccessible to us.
But once you understand how
disrupted visual perception is,
you realize that we are building
our experience from fragments.
Whether it's during an eye
movement, or during a blink,
the way we perceive continuity is
over these gaps in our perception.
We're always doing
a reconstruction.
We constantly create
this more complex whole
which only exists in our brains
by stitching together
these visual snapshots
between each of the
moments of discontinuity.
So it's an illusion
that it's continuous.
Because we see it
through these fragments.
And so if film editing
presents my visual system
with a sequence of views
that are close enough
to what I would get
from naturally moving
my eyes around.
Then my brain will relate
those shots to each other
like it would relate
them to each other
if I was really looking around.
And that's what makes it
so surprisingly
natural and intuitive.
And you can totally see that
with the early history of film.
Because there's no evidence that
people had problems
dealing with film editing.
Yeah, can you imagine
what would have happened
if they would have had problems?
The medium wouldn't
have gotten very far, right?
When people think
that continuity editing
copies the natural way of
perceiving our environment,
they say that first
we enter a room,
and then we focus on
something or somebody.
And this is similar to
cutting to a closer shot.
Because in real life
we have a desire to see things
from different angles
And move around
to see them better.
So some of them recognized
that it's the same animal.
But they don't feel
like they have to
connect these shots together.
It's like showing them
a photo of someone
and then putting it back down
and then showing another one.
They were perceiving
it like that, I think.
You might think that it's
just because they're old,
they didn't go to school,
or they live in that area.
So to eliminate
all these questions,
I needed to have a control group
with the same background,
but who have been
exposed to television
for more than ten years.
If they also didnt understand,
then the problem
is with my films.
But all of their interpretations
were just like mine
and yours would be.
So it was exciting to find
out something interesting.
And this is something
which would tell
lots of people
lots of things about
continuity editing.
As soon as I read this
interview with John Huston,
I began watching
when people blink.
And I began to see that
there was a relationship
between the points
at which we blink
and our interior state
and our perception
of what's around us.
So just to use an example,
in the real world,
in ordinary conversation,
talk to somebody
and tell them an idea.
And while you are
expressing that idea,
their eyes will remain open.
They won't blink.
When they think they
have got that idea
you may still be talking
but when they think:
I understand what
this person is saying,
the blink will happen.
It will happen at a specific
moment when they say,
I understand that concept.
So that the blink is
the thing that separates
one thought from another.
And as an editor,
there's a certain ripe point
where you want to
go to something else.
That is also the point at
which an actor in the scene
thinking more or less
the same thoughts
that the editor is thinking
blinks.
The parallels with cutting
began to emerge for me there,
which is to say,
a shot is an idea.
It can be more than that,
but while that shot is on
an idea is being expressed.
And so one of the things
that I believe editing,
at a very basic level,
is capable of doing,
is it's one of the
things that helps
to establish a
rhythm of thought.
What are you thinking
and how fast do you
want the thoughts to come?
How fast can the thoughts come?
Where should we exchange
one thought for another?
Listen,
if theres one sure-fire rule
that Ive learned in this business:
I dont know anything
about human nature.
I dont know anything
about curiosity.
Thats not part of what I do.
What I
This is my business.
And when Im
See you later.
And so the editing
of a well-realized film
is, in the best sense,
an accurate reflection
of the patterns
of thoughts
of the audience
watching the film.
My hunch is that
if an audience is really
in the grip of a film,
they are going to be
thinking like the film
each in their own way.
And that, as a rule,
the blinks will come
all at the same time.
More or less.
Huh?
When I examined the timing
of blink synchronization,
I found that viewers blinks
synchronized at the
boundaries of action.
So at the conclusion of action,
or when we think some
important thing will happen
people blink
and prepare for the
next visual information.
Like the punctuation
between two actions.
So in that sense, the
blink is like a film edit.
Yeah,
I agree.
I got this paper
to review for the journal
Psychological Science,
where this researcher had
found this population of people
who had never
seen movies before.
And I thought to myself,
Excellent.
This is a great chance to
demonstrate the naturalness
of our perception of cinema.
Because these people who
have never seen movies before
are going to look at the
movies she shows them
and they're going to get it.
They're going to
understand the movies.
And I remember
seeing the data table
thinking, Wait a minute,
this is showing that they
don't understand the movies.
They're not getting it.
They're saying this sequence of
shots just shows independent moments.
This really conflicts with the idea
that cinema is a natural process,
that cinema relies
on everyday skills.
And, you know,
youre doing science.
You can't just ignore data.
If this data is inconsistent
with what you think,
You need to either figure out
what the issue is with the data
or you need to
change what you think.
I was starting to think
maybe I should
change what I think.
Maybe you do have to
learn to perceive them.
I designed the study
from simple techniques
to more complicated techniques.
And I thought that they
wouldn't understand crosscutting,
because
it was very complicated.
It is astonishing
how quickly films
change after 1910.
So that by 1917, you
have many more shots
with space broken
down into individual bits.
And you also have
extensive crosscutting.
Where you have one character,
then we cut to another
character in another location,
then go back to
that first character.
Back and forth,
back and forth...
And it really does grab
you, theres no doubt.
You just go with it, it
tugs you right along.
Crosscutting usually has
temporal gaps between the actions.
So, first we see
the woman cooking,
and then the men working.
But you don't continue
from where the woman was
theyre now a bit
further in the action.
And so we perceive
it as two events
going on at the same time.
I could imagine,
that would be tough
for a first time viewer.
But the viewers
seemed to understand it.
They understood,
Oh yeah while the
woman prepares tea,
the men are out working,
and then they all get
together for lunch.
It was weird to me because
the most complicated
technique was understood easily,
whereas many of the simple
techniques couldn't be understood.
So...
I think what working
in this area for decades
has taught me
is how little we actually know
about perception.
I had always assumed
that the continuity we have
from the real world,
continuity of space and time,
will automatically
be mapped onto film.
So even with minimal
cues to how they related,
people would fill in
the gaps and they'd say
these two separate
images must relate.
But it seems that the naive
viewers didn't have that assumption.
So I was completely blown away
when I first saw Sermins experiments
because the sense was
that there's so much exposure
to TV, the Internet,
smartphones,
that you're not going to find
anybody who hasn't seen it before.
Even in the earliest
days of cinema,
there was all this context
which would have biased
how viewers interpreted it.
She didn't say what she
was going to show them
She didn't give any expectation
that they're going
to see a narrative
or something that should
be stitched together.
She just showed them
and said, Tell
me what you see.
So when we crossed
paths at a conference,
I had so many questions for her.
I think it's just
really fascinating.
It blew my mind and I'm
sure it blew yours as well,
because the
cross-cutting is so complex
youd think there's so
many things to keep track of.
And the fact they got it
I don't know what
you thought, Sermin
but it seems like they're making
sense of these simple lines of action
and that helps
them tie it together.
Yes, because it's
very common to cook
when there are workers
working for you in the garden.
So the plot was
quite clear for them.
Its almost like because
they understood that action,
they understood the edits.
Yeah, in this
case, that little story
really did a lot to
create the continuity.
Like the story acted as a
kind of throughline for them.
Yeah, one way of
looking at it is that
its a question of applying
the correct interpretive strategy
towards the images.
Someone could treat it like the
photo albums I have in my house.
Theyre these series of images
that may or may not
have to do with each other.
And that might be
taken as evidence
that you don't
understand cinema,
that you have to learn a
lot to understand movies.
But what if it's the case
that you just have
to tell the person,
No, don't think of
the pictures that way.
Put them together into a story.
Yeah, it's like all of
a sudden they get it
and they put these pictures together
into a set of actions that tell a story.
And that emphasizes the
importance that the action plays
in helping us tie
one shot to another.
Yeah, exactly.
So this one worked because
she's giving the bucket to him.
So there is a continuing action
And here it works because
he's obviously looking upwards
and we are seeing
the top of the tree.
But the shot-reverse shot here,
it's like theyre
just standing there.
They're not looking somewhere.
And so it might be that for
the shots that did not work,
maybe they didn't find enough
evidence that they're related
for them to be able to put
that final connection together.
And so they describe
exactly what's there.
One image goes,
another one comes.
Two completely separate images,
unconnected by the human mind.
What about adding
another element
that could help them,
like audio?
What do you think
would that work?
No?
I don't know what you think, but
I dont know,
from the empirical side,
I feel like it's possible.
And I think Sermin
approached it as a true scientist.
She was really open-minded
about trying to understand
what these individuals could do.
And so she was really
into going back up
and trying to make
some different movies.
Let's see what
these people can do
with another clue
about what's going on.
I think that when
we watch a film,
we continuously ask
ourselves questions
and then we are
looking for the answers.
But if you don't know films
as a storytelling device,
you wouldn't even
search for that meaning.
But if there was a sound
continuing through the cut,
would you start to bridge
the gap between the shots,
and build that
scene in your mind?
I thought this might help,
but I was not sure.
The shot-reverse shots
were different people,
but they were also the
same. Exactly the same
same camera
positions, same shot size.
But they were just saying
one word to each other,
and then
magic.
Straightaway they were saying, I
saw two men greeting each other.
So they were together at the
same time, at the same place.
In the initial experiments
she'd stripped everything back
in the best empirical
way possible
to just the images.
So can I stitch this image
together with this image?
And I think it was important
for me to see that data
and to be provoked in that way,
to make me realize the
importance of the extra information,
which I think is really
important to know scientifically
what the basic building blocks
are and how far you can push it.
Some of those films
that Sermin created were
great because they used audio,
but they were not simple.
Think about what you've got
to do to understand that movie.
I think the sound activated
a scene in their minds.
So they were able to
perceive it as a whole.
It just worked.
A film is constructed by editors
to understand the story.
But it is not only the editor.
Because we unconsciously
search for the suitable
time for blinking,
to segment the story
in our brain.
But because most blinks
are not synchronized
between people,
I still don't know why
we blink so much.
I did many, many experiments
for my blinking research
and I found a lot of pieces
but still don't know
the precise function.
It's still a mystery.
Nobody knows, in the world.
In editing, or I think in
any creative endeavor
we're trying to find a
path through the material.
So there is a great
deal of experimentation.
You know, theres that old saw:
films are never finished,
they're abandoned.
You could go on
working on this forever,
getting it right, but you can't.
So you have to stop.
What makes you stop?
In terms of editing a scene,
I will keep editing that scene
until I can no longer see
myself in any of the cuts.
Now my first cuts,
the first ideas I have for
things, how it goes together.
When I look at that, I can see
myself making those decisions.
I decided that, I decided
that, I decided that.
But the more the scene gets worked,
and the more refined it becomes
it reaches a point where
the shots themselves
seem to create each other.
This shot makes the next
shot, makes the next shot.
And there comes a point where
the Walter Murch who
decided those things,
he starts to be invisible to me
and the emotion, the
story seems to take over.
Whenever I tell about
my studies in Turkey,
most people are more interested
in those people and their lives
than the editing
techniques we tested.
But I haven't been to that part
of Turkey in almost ten years
and I expect that they might
have now been exposed to
some sort of videos.
They might have
bought televisions
or their grandchildren coming and
showing them from their cell phones.
But there was one
dream I left in Turkey.
I always wanted to organize
a film screening there,
showing them real
films on the big screen.
I find these stories so magical.
When they're started to be told
people just get
into the storyworld
and maybe get lost there.
and they don't
notice the techniques.
They just want to learn
what happens next.
It's just like all
of us in real life,
creating this illusion
with images in your mind.
deeply surprising to me.
Because I was so fond of films
how they engage us.
But you do experiments
not just to say,
"yes, I was right."
They didn't understand
why I was doing this.
But they were
watching and trying to
understand what
they were seeing.
And it was just like in
the early days of cinema.
It's an evolutionary
novel thing.
Eyes have been around on this
planet for around 400 million years.
And in none of that
time was it ever the case
that you took what was
presented to that eyeball
and instantaneously replaced it
with something totally different.
Until the advent of film.
The audience was baffled
by this new modern contrivance
and they came to
look and to marvel.
And most of the time
when you take a
perceptual- or motor-system
outside of its normal
range of operation,
things go south.
Things explode.
So this is what
could have happened:
You're looking at a shot of
a train arriving at the station.
And there's a cut
to a completely different shot.
And it's conceivable, given
the nature of the human brain,
that the whole audience
gets seasick and throws up.
And idea of motion pictures
would have died at that point.
Just like the fact that we get
seasick on an ocean voyage,
a cut from one shot to another
could have had that same
completely disorienting result.
Because what youre looking at is a
violent disruption of physical reality.
Instantaneously, one
picture is replaced by another
and nothing in our day-to-day
experience mirrors that.
Which is why when
cinema first emerged,
the camera was put on a tripod
and you filmed
the scene in front
and you minimized the changes
from one perspective to another
because it was believed that it
would be jarring to the viewers.
A few years into
the 20th Century,
that assumption is gone.
Filmmakers realized
that actually, I can cut
viewers perfectly understand it.
And from that moment,
cinema took off.
I think that early filmmakers
had an intuition about what
their audience would understand.
That I can show
you something here
and then there,
and then you can connect
these shots together
in a story.
I think this is the
magic of films,
how they make us
live in the storyworld.
But the mysterious
fact is that edits work,
cuts do work we
know they work.
So the paradox that Im setting
in the middle of the floor
for you here is very simple.
Why do they work?
Sermin, how did you get
involved with these experiments
on the psychology
of continuity editing?
I studied film and after graduation I
worked on film sets, in productions,
and gradually I stepped up
to a script supervising role
and I became
obsessed with continuity.
Because most films
actually are not made
like you watch them
you watch the
edited version of it.
But on a film set, we shoot all
the actions from one camera angle
and then the same action
from another camera angle.
We shoot them again and
again from different angles,
and sometimes we
shoot an actor on one day
and sometimes we
shoot an actor on one day
and then shoot the other
actor on another day,
And then the editor will
cut the shots together
to give the audience an impression
that they were there at the same time,
at the same place.
This is called
continuity editing.
And I was really fascinated
with these techniques.
So I decided to go
back back to university
to find out how it works.
In those first few
years of cinema,
filmmakers quickly discovered
that we've really
got something here.
The editing of moving images
is the one thing that you
can't do in another art form.
And there's nothing
in a single shot
that corresponds to what
you can do with a cut.
Editing can control
very exactly what
the spectator sees.
Look at this.
Look at that.
Pay attention to this.
Or someone leaves
Cut
They come in another door
Okay, I understand.
They walked through the door.
Pretty basic, pretty primal.
But it took people
a while to figure out
the best ways to do this.
But gradually, this
all kind of crystallized
around the end of the 1910s
into a standardized style.
The continuity system.
Which is a set of choices
for how the whole scene
should flow together.
It flows through space,
it flows through time.
Just quietly steering
the viewer's eye
around the scene.
And these techniques were quickly
comprehended around the world.
People got it, people
understood the continuity system.
And by the 1920s,
most filmmakers are
using continuity techniques
all the way through their films.
It's the way they think
of making the movie.
And even today?
Of course, today. Of course.
That's one of the most fascinating
things about the continuity system
Why?
Inside we have
moving pictures...
The Lumiere Brothers
had invented the movies...
Wind the tape back,
to the beginning
and cinema could have
gone a lot of different ways.
Why do we have what
we have? is the question.
It's just so surprising.
This small set of techniques
that were developed over
a period of 10 or 12 years
still form the basis for
cutting together a scene.
But one of the fascinating
things about early cinema:
it put filmmakers in the position
of being amateur psychologists.
Through this series of
informal experiments
cutting scenes together
in different ways.
Filmmakers developed
this really interesting intuition
about the perceptual process.
And that is: a substantial
proportion of time
people don't notice the edits.
And the hardest edits to detect
are called match action edits.
Where action in one shot
continues across the edit.
Creating this
illusion of continuity
between shots.
Alas
I cannot claim this
next feat as illusion.
And so in the process
of developing cinema
filmmakers plugged into
something deep about us
at a perceptual level.
Watch carefully.
And created an art form
that's almost
effortless to understand.
Youll see no trickery...
Around the world, we all
have the same film language
the continuity
editing techniques.
Which seem so natural that
even without any experience
we can make sense of them.
And when I went
back to university,
I was introduced to
cognitive film theory,
which I loved.
And learned about
all these psychologists
claiming that continuity editing
corresponds to
real-life perception.
For me, as a scientist
interested in perception,
the fact that continuity
editing works so well
and is so persistent
and so dominant
and is often totally
invisible to people.
Suggests that there's
something going on in these edits
that's shaped
to our natural
mechanisms of vision.
And I was sure they
knew what they were doing.
So I was supporting the
continuity editing rules.
They make sense so easily
because they're exploiting the
ways of seeing we already have.
And so I personally
think it tells us a lot about
the way humans see the world
that's what the style is.
So for my Ph.D.,
I was very excited to
research this question:
If people understand
these editing techniques
as easily as real life.
I think that was crucial for the
development of early cinema.
Because it really had to
be a form of communication
that people could understand
without a lot of learning.
Find me somebody
who had to spend years
to understand the movies.
You don't see it.
And the best way of testing
this unanswered question
is to find adults who have
never seen films before
which seems very
impossible in this era.
But this is also when
I met a journalist
who told me about these people
living in a remote
part of Turkey.
He told me that they were
so amazed to see a car.
So I thought, I must
find these people.
If they haven't
seen a car before,
maybe they havent
seen a film before as well.
I was invited to give a
series of lectures in Australia
back in the late 1980s.
And one of them was recorded.
This is Tape 2 of Walter Murch
speaking in October of 1988,
subject is editing,
continuation.
And eventually, a transcription of
that tape was published as a book.
In the Blink of an Eye: a
Perspective on Film Editing"
So the book, In
the Blink of an Eye
is one of those lectures.
At the beginning
of the last session
I deposited this question
in the middle of the floor:
why do cuts work?
We all know that they do.
And yet when you think about
it, it's surprising that they do
because of what's
actually taking place.
With anything like this, if you
look at it and try to come up
with some reasons for it, the
first areas that you look at is:
are there any human
equivalents to this?
Can we find any junction points
between our own experience
and what we have in film?
Or is the cut a purely arbitrary invention
that people have just gotten used to?
I first began to get
a glimmer of this
when I was cutting
The Conversation.
The Conversation was the
first feature film that I'd ever edited.
So there were many late nights.
And sometimes I
would look at a shot
of Harry Caul working
his tape recorder
and Gene Hackman, the
actor, would hit the stop button
on his machine.
And I would be amazed
to see that the KEM,
the machine that I was
using to edit, kept moving.
Because I thought,
Well, he stopped it. My
machine should stop also.
But it didn't. So
then I would realize,
Oh, I'm very
sleepy and that's why
I'm having this experience.
So I think I'd been
working all night.
I'd be looking at a
closeup of Gene Hackman,
and I would pick a point
to cut out of the shot.
And what I would do
is try to think about what
the audience was thinking about,
which is also to try
to think what the actor
or the character
is thinking about.
So I'm just looking at a shot,
trying to get into
the character's head.
And you have to feel that moment
that says,
Cut!
So I made a deliberate but
largely unconscious decision
to cut here.
Mark that frame.
Okay.
Let me try it again.
You rewind.
Play the shot again.
Feel the same thing,
kind of a rising pressure.
And now.
What I kept finding
was that the point where I said,
that's enough of this closeup.
Right around there,
within some close proximity
Gene Hackman blinked.
And it happened often enough
that I began to wonder
what was going on here.
So Tim: Can you give me a
very simple and clear example
of how a continuity editing technique
mimics our natural perception?
Can I do a demo?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay.
Ill just test it first.
One of the most interesting
things about visual perception
is just how
counterintuitive it is.
So, for example, it's
really hard to appreciate
the degree to which
looking at one thing,
sacrifices awareness of
things you're not looking at.
Because it kind of feels like
as you're looking around a room,
what you have is
something like a picture
that's high resolution
throughout the visual field.
But in fact, thats not
really what you have.
Because when the
light comes into the eye,
the area that is most in focus
is roughly equivalent to
your thumbnail at arm's length.
And as you move
out into the periphery
very rapidly, it just becomes
a blobby, colorful blur.
You move it, you can
see it perfectly fine,
but you couldn't see how many
creases there are in your knuckle.
But that is not a limitation.
That is an
evolutionary efficiency.
Because what it enables us to do
is represent in incredible detail that
which we think is going to be relevant
by moving our eyes
around a scene.
So we're constantly trying to
extract cues from the environment
about where to look next.
And one really valuable
cue for figuring out
where to look next is eye gaze.
So if I look over there...
Your natural tendency
is to ask yourself a question,
What are they looking at?
And then you want to see
the target of their gaze.
So if you see someone in a
medium shot looking a certain way,
you're automatically
assuming that theres something
outside that frame
that they're looking at.
And when the next shot
shows you something
that confirms that possibility,
say, another person looking
in the opposite direction.
We intuitively understand these
spaces are next to each other.
So the eyeline match
can override the fact that
you're breaking up the space
and not showing X and
Y in the same frame.
So this kind of editing really
is such a powerful device
because the spectator
builds the scene up
in her or his head.
And it seems to be tapping
into some human capacities
that are built into the
way we see in the world.
In the 1970s, when the
Turkish state was bringing
some electricity
to these mountains,
they built villages
down the hills
and they invited people to
move to these new houses
without any cost.
But some people
didn't want to move in.
Some of them
wanted to stay there
on top of mountains.
So they didn't have
electricity for a very long time.
These are the ones that
didn't have any television at all
and had never been exposed
to any form of films before.
I think laughing and smiling was
the most common first reaction.
It was fun for them,
a joy that you would see in
a kid's eyes when
they see a new toy.
The first films they've seen
in their entire life.
I wish I could have
made them better,
but they were
very amateur films.
I think in the early
days of cinema,
the most important discovery
was cutting on action.
It's like the magic
which makes the cuts disappear.
Even for very
experienced viewers.
So I was very
excited to see that
match-on-action
cut works perfectly
with first-time adult
viewers as well.
They could connect
the shots together
and maybe they didn't
even notice the cut.
If someone looks up,
then you would look
where he is looking at.
And it's the same
thing with eyeline match.
And all the inexperienced
viewers understood.
And, of course
shot-reverse shots can also
be interpreted as eyeline match.
It seems so natural.
This was what I thought.
This was not what
I was expecting.
But they said,
One of them came.
He went.
And then the other one came.
So when they were not
able to see him anymore
he has disappeared.
So then I wondered if
over-the-shoulder shots
might help to
connect them together.
Because you see a
part of the other person,
so they're not
disappearing theyre there.
but they still
couldn't understand it
as two people at the same
time, at the same place.
And after five
participants said,
Hes gone
and another one comes.
I thought, Very surprising.
Sometimes when you're working,
especially with something
that you love doing,
you lose a sense of time.
So it was about
5:00 in the morning
and I walked out to
get some breakfast
and I walked past
the Christian Science Bookstore.
And they had the opening page
of the Christian Science Monitor
with an interview with
fim director John Huston.
And he was talking
about his film experience
and, as an example of some
other point he was making,
he was attacking the use
of the pan as a point of view.
As a rule, the camera's
the protagonist.
You enter the scene
through the camera's eyes.
And when would I want the pan?
Only when that
intervening space,
the relationship
between those objects,
one on one side of the room,
and the other on the other,
is important.
If it isn't important, you cut.
And so what you're doing when
you walk into the room and pan,
which is to say
somebody comes into the
room, there's a party going on,
the person comes
into the room and
that happens.
But it isn't like reality.
Do that sometime, he said.
Come into a room
and get hit with a new scene
and you will not do
that.
What you'll do is:
That,
that, that and that.
That the head moves
and it stops momentarily,
takes a picture
and then moves again,
takes another picture.
And he said Huston
It has a physiological function,
the camera.
For instance, let's take the cut
And the
psychology of the cut,
The physiology of the cut.
Try this little trick yourself.
Look at that lamp in
one corner of the room.
It's extreme left.
And now look back
here, at this lamp.
You've done a
complete right angle.
Right. Now do it again
Now do it once more.
You notice, doing that,
you blink your eyes.
Right. You blank it out.
Because there's no
point in viewing all this
to come over here.
That's a cut.
I see.
Look what happens to the eye.
There is a lowering
of the eyelids
at the point of movement.
That is the blink
and the blink is the cut.
The blink is the cut.
That lodged in my brain.
Because as the eyes
move, what you want to do
is bring these two
images together.
That's what a cut is.
That's what a cut does.
Once that idea emerged
from the shrubbery,
I just began to watch people.
And what I began to sense
was that I was seeing something
that was not what they tell
you in the biology textbooks.
I always monitored other people's
blinking behavior on the train.
and check when and
how often they blink.
In Japan, is it considered polite to
stare at others, watching their blinks?
We seldom stare at
people, especially in the train.
So, it made people feel
nervous and uncomfortable.
It's quite strange
why human beings
generate so much blinking.
Most people think that we
blink to moisturize our eyeballs.
But, on average, we
generate 20 blinks per minute,
more than five times
necessary for ocular lubrication.
I thought, we have a reason
to generate so many blinks.
So I started to monitor
blinking behavior
while people watched
the same video.
I utilized Mr. Bean, which
is a famous British comedy.
And I found that the blink rate
showed a large decrease.
Because the viewers have
to pay a lot of attention.
But unexpectedly, I also noticed
a surprising phenomenon.
The timing of blinks
tended to show
strong synchronization.
So audiences blinks
are synchronized to the movie.
But interestingly, the degree
of blink synchronization
is the strongest
for the first viewing.
By the third viewing,
it is quite boring.
Because the viewers
know what will happen.
So I realized that blinking
might be a clue to how
the viewers process
or understand the story.
One of the things you
notice when you watch films
is that people look
straight at each other,
even stare at each other
and don't blink.
For the sake of drama.
No surprise there, right?
Filmmakers want people
to watch films intently.
And if we see people
looking at each other intently,
humans pay attention.
That is a heightening,
a ratcheting up,
of an already existing tendency.
And one way to think
about the continuity style
is that the tendencies
that we have
are tapped and
enhanced and amplified
by the film technique.
For instance, when two characters
are advancing towards each other,
if one character is
moving from
left-to-right in one shot
then the other should be
moving right-to-left in the next.
And that's intuitively
obvious because
we can't instantly jump
to the other side
and see them going in
the opposite direction.
And so in terms of the
space represented for a scene,
the way that this
gets thought about
is through a so-called
180-degree system.
Which allows you to cut
to pretty much any point
on one side of the action.
And it seems to build out
from our perceptual inclinations.
So you can then enjoy the
scene of outrageous violence
because you already
understand what's going on.
When you first start
thinking about editing,
you think, Wow,
how can people make
sense of all this stuff?
Because there's nothing that's as
jumpy and disrupted and interrupted
as a whole bunch of film edits.
With one exception.
Because only a small part of
our visual field is high resolution.
Weve got to keep moving
our eyes around all the time
to update what's
going on at that point.
Each of those movements
is called a saccade.
And they're very fast
ballistic movements
and happen about
three times a second.
And when your eyeball
is moving fast like that,
it's essentially useless.
You're getting this
kind of whoosh.
This smeared
blur of information.
And that's not information
your brain can use.
So your brain actually
shuts down that input.
So that you're effectively blind
while that saccade is happening.
In addition to that,
we blink every 2 or 3 seconds.
So between blinks and saccades
were functionally blind
a third of our waking lives,
which I find totally
bizarre and threatening.
It is quite surprising when
you start breaking down
how much of our
everyday experience
is inaccessible to us.
But once you understand how
disrupted visual perception is,
you realize that we are building
our experience from fragments.
Whether it's during an eye
movement, or during a blink,
the way we perceive continuity is
over these gaps in our perception.
We're always doing
a reconstruction.
We constantly create
this more complex whole
which only exists in our brains
by stitching together
these visual snapshots
between each of the
moments of discontinuity.
So it's an illusion
that it's continuous.
Because we see it
through these fragments.
And so if film editing
presents my visual system
with a sequence of views
that are close enough
to what I would get
from naturally moving
my eyes around.
Then my brain will relate
those shots to each other
like it would relate
them to each other
if I was really looking around.
And that's what makes it
so surprisingly
natural and intuitive.
And you can totally see that
with the early history of film.
Because there's no evidence that
people had problems
dealing with film editing.
Yeah, can you imagine
what would have happened
if they would have had problems?
The medium wouldn't
have gotten very far, right?
When people think
that continuity editing
copies the natural way of
perceiving our environment,
they say that first
we enter a room,
and then we focus on
something or somebody.
And this is similar to
cutting to a closer shot.
Because in real life
we have a desire to see things
from different angles
And move around
to see them better.
So some of them recognized
that it's the same animal.
But they don't feel
like they have to
connect these shots together.
It's like showing them
a photo of someone
and then putting it back down
and then showing another one.
They were perceiving
it like that, I think.
You might think that it's
just because they're old,
they didn't go to school,
or they live in that area.
So to eliminate
all these questions,
I needed to have a control group
with the same background,
but who have been
exposed to television
for more than ten years.
If they also didnt understand,
then the problem
is with my films.
But all of their interpretations
were just like mine
and yours would be.
So it was exciting to find
out something interesting.
And this is something
which would tell
lots of people
lots of things about
continuity editing.
As soon as I read this
interview with John Huston,
I began watching
when people blink.
And I began to see that
there was a relationship
between the points
at which we blink
and our interior state
and our perception
of what's around us.
So just to use an example,
in the real world,
in ordinary conversation,
talk to somebody
and tell them an idea.
And while you are
expressing that idea,
their eyes will remain open.
They won't blink.
When they think they
have got that idea
you may still be talking
but when they think:
I understand what
this person is saying,
the blink will happen.
It will happen at a specific
moment when they say,
I understand that concept.
So that the blink is
the thing that separates
one thought from another.
And as an editor,
there's a certain ripe point
where you want to
go to something else.
That is also the point at
which an actor in the scene
thinking more or less
the same thoughts
that the editor is thinking
blinks.
The parallels with cutting
began to emerge for me there,
which is to say,
a shot is an idea.
It can be more than that,
but while that shot is on
an idea is being expressed.
And so one of the things
that I believe editing,
at a very basic level,
is capable of doing,
is it's one of the
things that helps
to establish a
rhythm of thought.
What are you thinking
and how fast do you
want the thoughts to come?
How fast can the thoughts come?
Where should we exchange
one thought for another?
Listen,
if theres one sure-fire rule
that Ive learned in this business:
I dont know anything
about human nature.
I dont know anything
about curiosity.
Thats not part of what I do.
What I
This is my business.
And when Im
See you later.
And so the editing
of a well-realized film
is, in the best sense,
an accurate reflection
of the patterns
of thoughts
of the audience
watching the film.
My hunch is that
if an audience is really
in the grip of a film,
they are going to be
thinking like the film
each in their own way.
And that, as a rule,
the blinks will come
all at the same time.
More or less.
Huh?
When I examined the timing
of blink synchronization,
I found that viewers blinks
synchronized at the
boundaries of action.
So at the conclusion of action,
or when we think some
important thing will happen
people blink
and prepare for the
next visual information.
Like the punctuation
between two actions.
So in that sense, the
blink is like a film edit.
Yeah,
I agree.
I got this paper
to review for the journal
Psychological Science,
where this researcher had
found this population of people
who had never
seen movies before.
And I thought to myself,
Excellent.
This is a great chance to
demonstrate the naturalness
of our perception of cinema.
Because these people who
have never seen movies before
are going to look at the
movies she shows them
and they're going to get it.
They're going to
understand the movies.
And I remember
seeing the data table
thinking, Wait a minute,
this is showing that they
don't understand the movies.
They're not getting it.
They're saying this sequence of
shots just shows independent moments.
This really conflicts with the idea
that cinema is a natural process,
that cinema relies
on everyday skills.
And, you know,
youre doing science.
You can't just ignore data.
If this data is inconsistent
with what you think,
You need to either figure out
what the issue is with the data
or you need to
change what you think.
I was starting to think
maybe I should
change what I think.
Maybe you do have to
learn to perceive them.
I designed the study
from simple techniques
to more complicated techniques.
And I thought that they
wouldn't understand crosscutting,
because
it was very complicated.
It is astonishing
how quickly films
change after 1910.
So that by 1917, you
have many more shots
with space broken
down into individual bits.
And you also have
extensive crosscutting.
Where you have one character,
then we cut to another
character in another location,
then go back to
that first character.
Back and forth,
back and forth...
And it really does grab
you, theres no doubt.
You just go with it, it
tugs you right along.
Crosscutting usually has
temporal gaps between the actions.
So, first we see
the woman cooking,
and then the men working.
But you don't continue
from where the woman was
theyre now a bit
further in the action.
And so we perceive
it as two events
going on at the same time.
I could imagine,
that would be tough
for a first time viewer.
But the viewers
seemed to understand it.
They understood,
Oh yeah while the
woman prepares tea,
the men are out working,
and then they all get
together for lunch.
It was weird to me because
the most complicated
technique was understood easily,
whereas many of the simple
techniques couldn't be understood.
So...
I think what working
in this area for decades
has taught me
is how little we actually know
about perception.
I had always assumed
that the continuity we have
from the real world,
continuity of space and time,
will automatically
be mapped onto film.
So even with minimal
cues to how they related,
people would fill in
the gaps and they'd say
these two separate
images must relate.
But it seems that the naive
viewers didn't have that assumption.
So I was completely blown away
when I first saw Sermins experiments
because the sense was
that there's so much exposure
to TV, the Internet,
smartphones,
that you're not going to find
anybody who hasn't seen it before.
Even in the earliest
days of cinema,
there was all this context
which would have biased
how viewers interpreted it.
She didn't say what she
was going to show them
She didn't give any expectation
that they're going
to see a narrative
or something that should
be stitched together.
She just showed them
and said, Tell
me what you see.
So when we crossed
paths at a conference,
I had so many questions for her.
I think it's just
really fascinating.
It blew my mind and I'm
sure it blew yours as well,
because the
cross-cutting is so complex
youd think there's so
many things to keep track of.
And the fact they got it
I don't know what
you thought, Sermin
but it seems like they're making
sense of these simple lines of action
and that helps
them tie it together.
Yes, because it's
very common to cook
when there are workers
working for you in the garden.
So the plot was
quite clear for them.
Its almost like because
they understood that action,
they understood the edits.
Yeah, in this
case, that little story
really did a lot to
create the continuity.
Like the story acted as a
kind of throughline for them.
Yeah, one way of
looking at it is that
its a question of applying
the correct interpretive strategy
towards the images.
Someone could treat it like the
photo albums I have in my house.
Theyre these series of images
that may or may not
have to do with each other.
And that might be
taken as evidence
that you don't
understand cinema,
that you have to learn a
lot to understand movies.
But what if it's the case
that you just have
to tell the person,
No, don't think of
the pictures that way.
Put them together into a story.
Yeah, it's like all of
a sudden they get it
and they put these pictures together
into a set of actions that tell a story.
And that emphasizes the
importance that the action plays
in helping us tie
one shot to another.
Yeah, exactly.
So this one worked because
she's giving the bucket to him.
So there is a continuing action
And here it works because
he's obviously looking upwards
and we are seeing
the top of the tree.
But the shot-reverse shot here,
it's like theyre
just standing there.
They're not looking somewhere.
And so it might be that for
the shots that did not work,
maybe they didn't find enough
evidence that they're related
for them to be able to put
that final connection together.
And so they describe
exactly what's there.
One image goes,
another one comes.
Two completely separate images,
unconnected by the human mind.
What about adding
another element
that could help them,
like audio?
What do you think
would that work?
No?
I don't know what you think, but
I dont know,
from the empirical side,
I feel like it's possible.
And I think Sermin
approached it as a true scientist.
She was really open-minded
about trying to understand
what these individuals could do.
And so she was really
into going back up
and trying to make
some different movies.
Let's see what
these people can do
with another clue
about what's going on.
I think that when
we watch a film,
we continuously ask
ourselves questions
and then we are
looking for the answers.
But if you don't know films
as a storytelling device,
you wouldn't even
search for that meaning.
But if there was a sound
continuing through the cut,
would you start to bridge
the gap between the shots,
and build that
scene in your mind?
I thought this might help,
but I was not sure.
The shot-reverse shots
were different people,
but they were also the
same. Exactly the same
same camera
positions, same shot size.
But they were just saying
one word to each other,
and then
magic.
Straightaway they were saying, I
saw two men greeting each other.
So they were together at the
same time, at the same place.
In the initial experiments
she'd stripped everything back
in the best empirical
way possible
to just the images.
So can I stitch this image
together with this image?
And I think it was important
for me to see that data
and to be provoked in that way,
to make me realize the
importance of the extra information,
which I think is really
important to know scientifically
what the basic building blocks
are and how far you can push it.
Some of those films
that Sermin created were
great because they used audio,
but they were not simple.
Think about what you've got
to do to understand that movie.
I think the sound activated
a scene in their minds.
So they were able to
perceive it as a whole.
It just worked.
A film is constructed by editors
to understand the story.
But it is not only the editor.
Because we unconsciously
search for the suitable
time for blinking,
to segment the story
in our brain.
But because most blinks
are not synchronized
between people,
I still don't know why
we blink so much.
I did many, many experiments
for my blinking research
and I found a lot of pieces
but still don't know
the precise function.
It's still a mystery.
Nobody knows, in the world.
In editing, or I think in
any creative endeavor
we're trying to find a
path through the material.
So there is a great
deal of experimentation.
You know, theres that old saw:
films are never finished,
they're abandoned.
You could go on
working on this forever,
getting it right, but you can't.
So you have to stop.
What makes you stop?
In terms of editing a scene,
I will keep editing that scene
until I can no longer see
myself in any of the cuts.
Now my first cuts,
the first ideas I have for
things, how it goes together.
When I look at that, I can see
myself making those decisions.
I decided that, I decided
that, I decided that.
But the more the scene gets worked,
and the more refined it becomes
it reaches a point where
the shots themselves
seem to create each other.
This shot makes the next
shot, makes the next shot.
And there comes a point where
the Walter Murch who
decided those things,
he starts to be invisible to me
and the emotion, the
story seems to take over.
Whenever I tell about
my studies in Turkey,
most people are more interested
in those people and their lives
than the editing
techniques we tested.
But I haven't been to that part
of Turkey in almost ten years
and I expect that they might
have now been exposed to
some sort of videos.
They might have
bought televisions
or their grandchildren coming and
showing them from their cell phones.
But there was one
dream I left in Turkey.
I always wanted to organize
a film screening there,
showing them real
films on the big screen.
I find these stories so magical.
When they're started to be told
people just get
into the storyworld
and maybe get lost there.
and they don't
notice the techniques.
They just want to learn
what happens next.
It's just like all
of us in real life,
creating this illusion
with images in your mind.