Cinema Within, The (2024)

[bunniefuu]

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 sh**t all

the actions from one camera angle

and then the same action

from another camera angle.

We sh**t them again and

again from different angles,

and sometimes we

sh**t an actor on one day

and sometimes we

sh**t an actor on one day

and then sh**t 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.