Monday 25 September 2017

jump-cut

Despite its novelty and notwithstanding anecdotes of panicked early audiences rushing away from the screen at the sight of an oncoming train, cinematographers put together and edit scenes and montages in much the same way as humans augment their visual experience by allowing their brains to fill in the gaps, as we learn from ร†on Video via Laughing Squid. Previously we were introduced to the rather vexing notion of saccade-masking and how we are effective blind to the outside world a significant portion of the day and how smooth, sweeping transitions are illusory compared to the fragmentary and clawing reality of our sense of sight, and this short documentary does a very good job of demonstrating how resolving focus, peripheral vision, intention and attention collaborate to produce a director’s cut of remembered sight whose stage and screen parallels perhaps couldn’t be appreciated until deconstructed.  Aside from the rather remarkable fact that we were so willing to take to the format and venue and are now more willing to engage with our flat things than the real dimensions around us in terms of narrative and belief, the genius of film-makers for exploiting this visual conceit for story-telling was something taken for granted as well.