Movies Without Cuts: A Scientist’s Experiments

May 2, 2014, 14:35 PM

http://filmmakermagazine.com/85830-movies-without-...

few days ago at Pacific Standard, Jennifer Ouellette profiled Sergei Gepshtein, a neuroscientist with a dream: to eliminate cutting from movies as much as possible. Gephstein studies human perception and the window of visibility. What Gephstein’s doing is tracking how human eyes respond to basic images: the visual example you can see in the profile concerns a series of lines forming the shape of a cube. The brain has to sort out whether it’s “seeing” the cube from above or below. “Either orientation can be discerned in the original image, but the brain cannot see both at once,” Oullette notes. “It will pick one. That is an example of perceptual organization, something we all engage in without realizing it."