Joining host Michael Azevedo on this episode is Chad Freidrichs, the director and editor of a fascinating and intriguing film called "The Cinema Within."

"The Cinema Within," which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video and on Vimeo, is a feature-length documentary that delves into the psychology of film editing – the mystery of how and why an edited movie feels so natural and so effortlessly makes sense.

Drawing on the insights of famed movie 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.

But in the remote mountains of Turkey, a young researcher – and a group of people who have never seen a film before – put this deepest of cinematic ideas to the test.

Playfully inventive in its construction and striking in its visuals, the documentary 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.

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