A Cut Is An Argument About Cause And Effect
Place two images side by side and an audience will build a relationship between them, whether or not one exists.
The foundational discovery of editing is that meaning is manufactured at the join. Show a face, then show a plate of food, and the face reads as hungry. Show the same face, then show a coffin, and it reads as grieving. The face has not changed. The audience is doing the work, because human beings are relentless pattern makers who cannot look at two adjacent things without proposing a link. Editors exploit this constantly. Much of what audiences credit to performance is actually credited wrongly: it is the arrangement around the performance that supplies the emotion, and a great editor can find a reading in footage that was shot with a different reading in mind.
This has a hard consequence. Because the audience always builds a link, an editor cannot avoid making a claim. There is no neutral cut. Placing a reaction after a line says the reaction was caused by the line. Placing it before says the character anticipated it. Holding on the speaker and never cutting to the listener says the listener does not matter yet, which is itself a statement, and the eventual cut to them will land harder for the wait. Editing is therefore closer to argument than to assembly. The rushes are evidence, and the cut is the case being made from them.
The practical skill lies in knowing what the audience is currently asking. At any moment a viewer has a question in their head: who said that, what is behind the door, does she believe him. Cutting on the question answers it and feels smooth. Cutting away from the question creates tension, and cutting to something irrelevant creates confusion, which is a different thing and rarely useful. Editors talk about this as riding the audience's attention. It is why a scene can be technically well shot and still feel wrong: the images are fine, but they arrive in an order that answers questions nobody asked and ignores the one everybody did.