One of the very first actions that editing developed in order to tell a story to the audience was the invention of the cut and the subsequent juxtaposition of one image connected to the previous or the following one.

An anecdote often used to explain one possible origin of the cut involves Georges Méliès (1861–1938). After shooting some footage outdoors, while developing the film Méliès noticed that at one point the camera must have jammed, unintentionally splicing together two different images: a carriage and a hearse.

There is no certainty as to whether this actually happened, but what is interesting is that cutting and joining images did not seem to emerge naturally. Walter Murch, a long-time collaborator of director Francis Ford Coppola, theorized that the human eye seems to be designed precisely to reject editing. Consequently, the films of the Lumière brothers or Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark should represent what is closest to the perception of the human eye.

It is also fascinating to consider the experiment carried out by Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé with Enter the Void, in which the spectator finds themselves inside the protagonist’s head, following the story through his eyes. The plot follows Oscar, a young man living in Tokyo with his sister Linda. Being a drug dealer, he is killed during a police raid, and the rest of the film unfolds entirely from his point of view as a spirit wandering through space and time.

What makes this work particularly unique is the attention to detail in creating a real sense of immersion in the character, especially in the first part of the film when Oscar is still alive. Through his subjective point of view, beyond the camera movements that mirror the “real” movements of his body and the hallucinations caused by drugs, there is a frequent use of blinking.

After the protagonist’s death and his transformation into a spirit, the film continues through a continuous subjective perspective, a series of false long takes interspersed with flashbacks and occasional scene changes.

But what makes cuts appear natural to the human eye?
Walter Murch argues that the answer lies in two things we all do every day: when we dream and when we blink. Dreams are rarely linear and always tied to a single subjective viewpoint, just like in waking life. Blinking, on the other hand, is a concept he developed while editing Coppola’s The Conversation and later confirmed in an interview with director John Huston (1906–1987):

“Cinema is like thought. Of all the arts, it is the one that comes closest to it. Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look at the lamp again. Now look at me again. Did you see what you just did? You blinked. Those are cuts. After the first glance, you know there’s no need for a continuous pan from me to the lamp, because you already know what’s in between. Your mind cuts the scene.”

The brain accepts this grammar because it does not perceive it as something foreign—since it can reproduce the same mechanism itself through the eyes and the blinking of eyelids. That is why we can accept cuts and transitions in films that do not attempt to mirror reality faithfully.