Film Theory Explores Why We Overlook Editing Cuts in Movies

Have you ever wondered why we don’t notice the cuts in films and television shows? After all, edits are essentially cuts in the “reality” of the story being told, so they should be jarring and disruptive. Playwright and director Bertolt Brecht used techniques like breaking the fourth wall and displaying placards to remind his audience that they were watching a production, not something real. But in film and television today, these techniques are standard practice, yet they don’t seem to pull us out of the story. So why is that?

Well, the truth is, we do notice bad cuts – the ones that cut too soon or too often, making it hard to follow the action. But when editing is done well, it goes unnoticed. The editor’s job is to be invisible, after all. But how is it possible that we remain locked into the narrative even when the cuts are from unrealistic viewpoints, like a long shot of a clock tower to a close-up of the ticking clock hand? Famed editor and theorist Walter Murch puts it best: “The mysterious part of [editing] is that the joining of those pieces – the ‘cut’ in American terminology – 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.”

But it’s not just in film and television that we edit what we see. Our brains are constantly dividing up the torrent of information streaming in through our senses into more manageable chunks to help us make sense of what’s happening around us and predict what’s likely to happen next. We have a mental model of what’s happening that we use to anticipate what’s coming up in a few seconds, allowing us to react adaptively. And whenever the action changes, we update our mental model to reflect what’s happening now.

So, in a way, editing is built on the foundation of how we perceive the world around us. We neglect non-important visual cues and delegate moments of time into event boundaries, like scenes, which allow for greater memory recall. And that’s why, when done well, editing is unnoticeable. It’s simply a part of how we process information.