This short book by Walter Murch, an american film editor who has cut films such as Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979), The Godfather Part III (Coppola, 1990) and Ghost (Zucker, 1990) talks about why we make cuts and what we hope to achieve with each one. May that be the effect it has one the audience or for transitional purposes. Not only that be also divulges into the length of time that it can take to make one cut, and how editors may spend days deciding.
One of the most fundamental chapters to me was Chapter 13: Don't Worry It's Only A Movie and subsequently Chapter 14: Dragnet. Both of these chapters overlap in talking about how when we blink, it can be interpreted into a cut, first noticed by Murch during his first picture cutting job, The Conversation (Coppola, 1974) and re-established when reading John Huston's interview by Louise Sweeney in Christian Science Monitor, (August 11th,1973)
""Look at the lamp acroos the room. Now look back at me. Look back at the lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts." [...] My head may move smoothly from one side of the room to the other, but, in fact, I am cutting the flow of visual images into significant bits, the better to juxtapose and compare those bits - "Lamp" and "Face" in Huston's example - without irrelevant information getting in the way" (Page 60)
This allows me to understand and think more carefully about where I make a cut in my work, cutting not only because I feel as though it is time to establish another character, face or emotion, but because I know the cutting will have a long lasting but invisible effect on the audience. Almost as if, it is seamlessly not mentioned then its natural like them selves have blinked between two objects.
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