The average “real-world” rate of blinking is somewhere between the extremes of four and forty blinks per minute. If you are in an actual fight, you will be blinking dozens of times a minute because you are thinking dozens of conflicting thoughts a minute—and so when you are watching a fight in a film, there should be dozens of cuts per minute.20 In fact, statistically the two rates—of real-life blinking and of film cutting—are close enough for comparison: Depending on how it is staged, a convincing action sequence might have around twenty-five cuts a minute, whereas a dialogue scene would
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