{"id":100712,"date":"2018-07-10T10:27:55","date_gmt":"2018-07-10T15:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.premiumbeat.com\/blog\/?p=100712"},"modified":"2018-07-10T10:27:55","modified_gmt":"2018-07-10T15:27:55","slug":"film-theory-invisible-edits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.premiumbeat.com\/blog\/film-theory-invisible-edits\/","title":{"rendered":"Film Theory: Why Don’t We Notice All Those Editing Cuts?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edits are cuts in the “reality” of a film or television show, so they should be jarring. So why don’t we really notice them?<\/h2>\n

Bertolt Brecht<\/a>\u00a0is a well-known playwright and director of the early twentieth century. The\u00a0Brechtian<\/a>\u00a0approach to theater\u00a0alienated the audience to remind them that they were watching a\u00a0production and not something real. This was a far cry from other\u00a0playwrights\u00a0at the time, who sought to immerse their audiences in their stories. A few of the techniques Brecht\u00a0used\u00a0included breaking the fourth wall,\u00a0displaying placards that informed the audience of the location or time of the scene, and\u00a0including song and dance.<\/p>\n

These techniques kept the audience aware that they were an audience<\/em>.\u00a0And in film and television today, these techniques are standard practice. However, why is it that, unlike the Brechtian theater, these\u00a0elements do not\u00a0pull the audience\u00a0out of a film? Surely such an intrusive element should have a disruptive effect? So, why don’t we notice edit cuts?<\/p>\n

\"Film<\/a>

Image via spartakas<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Of course, there are cuts we do notice \u2014 the bad ones. The edits that cut too soon or too often. We lose sight of the fight in action scenes<\/a>\u00a0when the filmmakers\u00a0use quick cuts instead of\u00a0showcasing a well-choreographed scene in its entirety. However, excellent editing\u00a0goes unseen. After all, the editor’s job is to\u00a0be invisible. The American Cinema Editors Association<\/a> quite literally calls it the invisible art<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Still, the fact that we remain locked into the narrative when watching cuts of unrealistic viewpoints, such as a long shot of a tall bell-tower clock to a close-up of the ticking clock hand, is quite remarkable. Each of these actions is entirely alien to the real world. Famed editor and theorist Walter Murch<\/a> puts it more poignantly:<\/p>\n

Every theatrical film, except perhaps Hitchcock\u2019s Rope<\/em><\/a>, is made up of many different pieces of film joined together into a mosaic of images. The mysterious part of, though, is that the joining of those pieces \u2013 the ‘cut’ in American terminology \u2013 actually does seem to work, even though it represents a total and instantaneous displacement of one field of vision with another, a displacement that sometimes also entails a jump forward or backward in time as well as space.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Film<\/a>

Image via Warner Bros.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the same chapter from his book In The Blink of An Eye<\/a><\/em>, Murch goes on to say that it\u2019s almost surprising that we were able to concede to the idea of editing without completely rejecting the disparity between two images conjoined to tell a story. That\u2019s true. From the moment we wake to the moment we sleep, everything we see, even edited films, are in a single stream of continuous information.<\/p>\n

Although, is that the case? Well, using a similar exercise\u00a0to the one that gave Walter Murch the idea of using the blink as an edit point (video below),\u00a0we can see that we often omit visual information to stop becoming inundated with useless data.<\/p>\n

First, find an area of the room away from your monitor or phone to focus on. It could be a mirror, a television, a lunch menu \u2014 anything. After reading this sentence, look at the object, hold your focus for a few moments, then come back to the article. Unless you\u2019re superhuman, all of the information between looking from the screen to the other area of the room\u00a0gets omitted. And<\/em>\u00a0we\u2019ll blink often while looking at the two points of focus, just like an edit cut.<\/p>\n