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The Cinema Within

Director - Chad Freidrichs
Run Time - 93 minutes
Language - English
Format - Digital
Year - 2025
Genre - Documentary

Educational Interests - Cinema Studies, Media Studies, New Releases, Psychology

Available on Kanopy »

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From the director of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth comes a documentary about the psychology of film editing.

Why do film cuts work? Why do people around the world – even children – so effortlessly understand them? In real life we don't instantly jump from one viewpoint to another. Such a bizarre disruption of reality would be nauseatingly jarring. And yet, most viewers don’t even notice the hundreds or thousands of edits in their favorite films and shows.

THE CINEMA WITHIN delves into the mystery of how and why an edited movie feels so natural and so effortlessly makes sense. Drawing on the insights of editor Walter Murch, scholar David Bordwell, and a varied group of perceptual scientists, THE CINEMA WITHIN explores the idea that in film’s earliest years, the most common edits were instinctively shaped to fit the contours of human perception – and that this might explain why, more than a century later, most modern-day filmmakers still rely on these exact same techniques.

Produced over the course of four years, The Cinema Within is a film unlike any other. Playfully inventive in its construction and striking in its visuals, it dives deep into the deliberately hidden language of film editing – a language so seemingly natural it usually goes unnoticed. Drawing on dozens of examples from both well-known and obscure films across cinema history, it explores not only the essential grammar of the world’s most popular art form, but the very mechanics of how we perceive reality. The result is a scientific cinematic adventure – a documentary in which our basic understanding of film editing becomes the dramatic heart of its story.