The Soul Cut #01
by Etienne Delbiaggio | September 17th, 2025
A personal experience
At sixteen, I lost my job as an apprentice carpenter. I didn’t fully understand the causes or reasons behind it—perhaps they weren’t important then, and maybe they still aren’t now—but it hurt deeply to accept that I had lost what I believed was the job of my life. I had to roll up my sleeves and start over somewhere else to build a future for myself, but I felt lost and terrified that I might not have any talent in which I could truly “excel.”
From that moment, an inner doubt began to haunt me: personally speaking, was I ignorant? Or even stupid?
Over time, I learned it was all a matter of perspective: no genius can know everything about everything, but one becomes a genius by mastering and deeply understanding their own field. As for the second question, the literal definition of “stupid” refers to a person who deliberately causes harm or distress to others without gaining anything in return. I think I can safely say that I don’t fall into either of these categories, though I wish I had known that back then.
So, I decided to counter my ignorance by leaning on my innate curiosity. Between job searches, I began reading various authors considered classics of literature—Hemingway, Poe, Hugo, Dostoevsky—and watching a different film every day, falling hopelessly in love with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). My aim wasn’t to be better or superior to others, but rather a personal challenge: to understand what had made a classic endure, experiencing the thrill of a first reading or viewing and then identifying the elements and style that defined it and kept it alive in the collective imagination.
(Sopra: i fotogrammi iniziali di Taxi Driver (1976), diretto da Martin Scorsese)
A crucial influence was the bond with my two childhood friends, who also had vivid imaginations for creating comic and grotesque situations featuring some of the local “wildlife.” As our stories evolved, merely telling them aloud no longer satisfied us. To bring our ideas to life, we improvised with video editing, creating short comic sketches by re-cutting and re-dubbing scenes from famous films and adapting them to our own context. What ultimately pushed me toward post-production was seeing the work of my classmates at the CISA film school: given the same raw footage, twenty completely different works emerged. This led me to conclude that, personally, I would never truly have a rival in this field. Not because I believe I’m the best, but because I trust that if someone chooses to work with me, it’s because they value my sensitivity and the choices I make. My strength lies in my uniqueness as an individual: there may be thousands of other Etiennes editing videos around the world, but I am the Etienne who works with his own originality, which sets him apart.
As the years went by, I became more and more convinced that this passion shouldn’t remain just a temporary lifeline. I wanted it to become a purpose in life: just as some people had given me emotions, I wanted to offer the same to others going through moments even worse than mine, giving them a chance to unplug from their problems, even if only for a brief instant. This helped me answer the question of what I truly wanted to do in life. But it also raised another: how can a “simple” combination of images and sounds provoke visceral reactions in a viewer?
That was the moment I fell in love with the editing process: taking individual elements and combining them to create a unity whose ultimate goal is to evoke one or more emotions. To me, it was pure magic. And like real magic—how could it possibly work? Mind you, I’m not talking about mere technical skill. With enough practice, technique can be within anyone’s reach, and eventually anyone can learn to master cuts and crossfades. No, what I was asking myself was: how does the brain actually accept them?
In 1922, the pioneer of Russian montage theory, Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov (1899–1970), demonstrated with what came to be known as the “Kuleshov Effect” how a viewer’s perception could be influenced by a particular sequence of shots. He filmed the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin’s face, always with the same neutral expression, and intercut it with different images—for example, a beautiful woman or a young girl lying in a coffin.
The juxtaposition created a cognitive phenomenon: the audience’s perception of the man’s emotional state and intentions shifted depending on the following shot. They interpreted his expression differently based on the context. This worked because the association triggered a stimulus-response reaction: the woman or the dead child provided contextual information about what the man was supposedly facing, prompting the viewer to project their own emotions onto his expression, driven by the expectation set by the stimulus, which required some kind of “resolution.”
In short: depending on the context, we give different interpretations of the reality before us.
Ultimately, we apply this principle constantly in daily life. Since the dawn of humanity, our brains have evolved to make connections in order to find solutions that allowed us to survive. Each of us has our own personality and set of experiences—no matter how big or small—that enable us to interpret reality. It is through this process that the brain identifies with a work of art, gathering as much information as possible to form a complete picture and to express an emotional response. Moreover, when we engage with a work of art like cinema, we tacitly agree to suspend our disbelief, and depending on our openness to fiction, we momentarily accept the existence of the universe before us.
In conclusion, what I have learned is that this world holds countless points of view, which become stories, and those stories keep changing depending on context—and the context, in turn, influences the original point of view we started from. Take my personal experience: I still don’t know whether I am ignorant or not. But I feel at peace knowing I have found the job of my dreams and, from that context, I know that the most important emotion right now is simply being happy.
(Above: Kuleshov Effect’s recreation in 1927)
CREDITS:
stills from the movie Taxi Driver, by Martin Scorsese, Columbia Pictures, 1976
Kuleshov Effect’s recreation by Vsevolod Illarionovic Pudovkin, 1927
My name is Etienne Del Biaggio. I am a film editor, self-taught animator, and composer of original soundtracks based in Giubiasco (Ticino, Switzerland). After graduating in editing and video post-production from CISA in Locarno (2019), I collaborated with Béla Tarr on Alma by Dino Longo Sabanovic, presented at the Locarno Film Festival. From 2022 to 2023, I worked as lead editor at Fiumi Studios, producing documentaries and corporate videos for clients such as Siemens and EOC Ticino.
Alongside editing and music, I have developed skills in graphic design and animation, creating several animated short films. Beyond these passions, I also enjoy sharing my personal reflections on film editing through my blog The Soul Cut, with the hope of inspiring others to explore the subject.