PalCinema Review: The Cinema Within

A new documentary attempts to explore a link between film editing, perception, and blinking.

June 12, 2025

FILM: THE CINEMA WITHIN

DIRECTED BY: CHAD FREIDRICHS

STARRING: SERMIN ILDIRAR, WALTER MURCH, TAMAMI NAKANO

RATING: 2 ½ out of 4 stars

By Dan Pal

I do have to confess that turning on this film I knew immediately it wasn’t going to be much fun. The simple reason: I showed many documentaries like this in my classes through the years that were usually better and more accessible. It also felt like being back in the classroom. (I recently retired and don’t yet miss it.) The Sound Within is educational as it explores film editing and perception, continuity, eye movements, and…blinking.

Sermin Ildirar has been working on understanding film editing for more than a decade. She is the primary subject of this documentary as it traces, in retrospect, her research into whether our perceptions of editing are universal. You understand the concept of editing, right? Essentially, putting images together to create some kind of visual message is the primary role of all film editors. The Cinema Within, in addition to telling Ildirar’s story, explores the earliest days of movie making and notes that all of the basic rules of editing were established well over a hundred years ago. By interviewing film scholars and researchers, we get a basic lesson in all of the traditional editing transitions: match on action, eyeline matches, shot-reverse-shots, cross-cutting, etc. Some early examples are included. It’s all Film 101 stuff…until it isn’t.

This isn’t a film I would have shown in my intro to film courses. It branches off in too many directions that make it too academic and high-brow rather than accessible to novice film audiences. Director Chad Freidrichs makes this an exercise in trying to understand how film editing mimics our natural perceptions. A blink researcher is interviewed linking cutting with how often we blink our eyes. The technique of camera panning is also given a physiological exploration. Ultimately, Freidrichs attempts to make a link between our eyes, blinking, the brain, and how films are cut. Unfortunately, this gets a bit too heady for the average viewer, and frankly, as many times as I taught students about film editing, even I found some of the material and associations a bit indecipherable. Maybe I’ve just gotten too comfortable in my newly acquired status as a retiree…

There is an interesting aspect of Ildirar’s research that is included here though. She visits a remote village in Turkey that has had no access to films or any other visual media. She asks locals to explain what they are seeing in images she shows them on her computer. For instance, they see a donkey from one angle which is then cut to the same donkey from another angle. How many donkeys did they see? A few report that they see two. Is this because they’re not used to the tricks or are unfamiliar with how shots are edited together that most of us accept and take for granted? Perhaps. Some understand the more complicated technique of cross-cutting more than the basic direct cut between different angles on the same subject. This is interesting but the film doesn’t seem to come to any strong conclusion about this phenomenon.

While the film explores some of the finer details about editing it needed to include more specific examples from known films to support its points and offer more clarity. There’s a bit much emphasis on showing us the talking heads of film researchers, scholars, cognitive psychologists, and, of course, the blink researcher. There’s also a lot of visual images of people, from various points in film history, engaged in the act of film editing. While this shows us, without any explanation, the apparatus involved, it doesn’t really provide the concrete film examples needed to make the points more relevant to average viewers

Walter Murch is also a big part of this documentary. He’s one of the gods of film editing, having won Oscars for his work on films such as Apocalypse Now and The English Patient. I’ve seen him interviewed in other documentaries on the subject, including the superb The Cutting Edge: the Magic of Movie Editing from 2004. He can be very theoretical but also relatable. Here, not so much, and that has more to do with the direction Freidrichs takes this discussion than Murch’s own ability to communicate.

This isn’t a poorly made film but it is hard to recommend to general film audiences. Psychologists, Physiologists, and Editors perhaps. Also, if you’re into blinking…

The Cinema Within is currently available to rent on Amazon Prime.

What do you think? What’s your understanding of film editing and perception? Would you watch a documentary on editing?

For the PalCinema archive of reviews, click here.