DVD Review: The Cinema Within

DVD, Digital Release Date: May 20, 2025
Director: Chad Freidrichs
Price: DVD $14.96
Studio: First Run Features

Chad Freidrichs’ 2024 feature-length documentary The Cinema Within takes an impressively deep dive into a potentially fuzzy subject: the theory and psychology of film editing. There’s a mystery behind how and why an edited film appears to flow so organically (even the poorly edited ones!) and seems to effortlessly make sense, both narratively and perceptually.

Drawing on the insights of such talking head contributors as film theorists David Bordwell and Sermin Ildirar, neuroscientist Tamami Takano, psychologist Jeff Zacks, filmmaker/editor Walter Murch (editor of Francis Coppola’s The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, among many) and others, The Cinema Within turns back the clock to the earliest film—the late 19^th Century’s “actualities” of a train pulling into a station and workers leaving a factory, through the silent narrative era (including Thomas Editon’s 1910 Frankenstein) up to all manner of contemporary cinema (from Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s 1974 horror entry Messiah of Evil and Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 Oscar-winner Parasite).

What Freidrich and company set out to prove (or confirm!) is that from film’s earliest years up to today, the most common and hence recognizable edits seem to naturally fit the most basic elements of human perception. In other words, the mind does the work here; one picture is replaced my another and then another and they become a stream of pictures—indeed, a movie picture. The mind works similarly when it comes to editing—it fills in the blank that connects the picture. Indeed, it’s not unrealistic to theorize that a cut from one picture to another–a jarring cut–could have a completely disorienting result. But if that were indeed the case, then the idea of motion pictures would have died pretty early, a point offered by Walter Murch.

Fortunately, though filmmakers realized a little into the 20th Century that they can indeed cut from shot to shot–and viewers would understand it. And it quickly became clear that many of these edits would simply become invisible to people.

Produced over the course of four years, The Cinema Within offers positive proof that editing indeed works. And so does Freidrichs’ film.