What a Surgeon Notices in a Film

I am not a good person to sit next to in a cinema.

Not because I talk — I do not — but because I spend a distracting proportion of any film watching the edges of the frame, and afterwards I want to discuss the lighting when everyone else wants to discuss the ending.

There is an occupational explanation for this. A career in ophthalmology is a career spent thinking about a single question in different costumes: where is this person looking, and why? Visual fields, fixation, the way a squint pulls attention off-axis, the way the eye is drawn to the brightest thing in a scene whether or not it is the important thing. You spend twenty years on that and it does not politely switch off when the lights go down.

The frame is a visual field

A director is doing, deliberately and for money, what an ophthalmologist studies clinically. Composition is attention management. A shallow depth of field is a scotoma you have agreed to. A rack focus is a saccade someone else has decided for you. Put a small bright object in a dark frame and you can predict, to a near certainty, where every eye in the room will go — because the retina is not a democracy and the fovea gets what it wants.

What I find genuinely beautiful is that the best practitioners of this are invisible. You do not notice being steered. You experience it as having decided to look.

Editing is the same trick as eyelid surgery

This is the comparison I keep returning to, and I accept it sounds strained until you have done both jobs.

Oculoplastic surgery is judged by an unusual standard: the result is good if nobody can tell it happened. Not “looks nice” — looks unremarkable. A face that reads as rested rather than altered. The moment a viewer can identify the surgery, the surgery has failed, however technically clean it was.

Editing works to precisely the same standard. A cut that the audience feels is usually a cut that has gone wrong. The craft is measured entirely in what does not register. There is no award ceremony for the thing you did not notice, which is why both disciplines attract a certain kind of person — one who is content to be good at something that succeeds by disappearing.

Why I write about it

I review films occasionally for Celluloid Score, and I am aware that “eye surgeon writes about cinema” sounds like an affectation. Possibly it is. But I would defend it on the grounds that I am not bringing an outside hobby to film criticism so much as bringing the same question I ask in clinic to a different room.

Where is this person looking? And who decided that?