To Cut

Using examples from archaeology, viticulture, psychology, collage, and film editing, and thanks to invaluable discussions with people who cut, this article explores the symbolic meanings of a technical gesture, bridging the gap between finitude and beginnings: “The cut is not an end in itself, but a starting point for new arrangements, new points of convergence. It opens unexpected possibilities for invention and creation.”

Sharp objects conjure up a multitude of dark images. They evoke an atmosphere of violence, fueled by deadly confrontations, mutilation, war, decapitation, and ritual sacrifices, to which the clean, definitive cut affords a special place. In stories, we cut to wound or kill; sharpened blades tell of human survival and the depths of its violence. But “we’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things.” In exploration, war, and adventure, the cut goes hand in hand with a desire to act, certainly through the expression of instinctual violence, but also through powerful creative energy. Blades are not only used as weapons: they are also some of our most ancient tools. From the first flints to the axes that extend woodcutters’ arms, they open paths through the densest forests, cutting, slicing, trimming, and transforming the raw materials that make up the world. Wherever humans intervene to transform their living spaces, the cut is the starting point. From a planetary scale to the smallest objects, cutting is an integral part of assembling the shapes that build our material landscape. Plants, dwellings, furniture, foods, books, clothes… The world is full of the cuts that make its composition possible. Whether it’s metamorphosing a tree into energy or making clothing out of fabric, cutting transforms reality.

The cut reflects a desire to act, but also understand. Humans cut into the world’s flesh to reveal the invisible. Making an incision into a body is fundamental to many scientific fields, from geology to anatomy: it allows us to penetrate the thick material of the world, uncovering its mysteries and making it visible.

In archaeologist Sabrina Save’s workshop, blocks of earth sampled from archaeological sites around the world pile up. Her job here is to transform earth samples into microscopically thin sections to send to university laboratories for analysis. To prepare them, she encases pieces of earth in blocks of resin that she cuts into progressively thinner slices. For the samples to be observable, light must pass through the rock: the sections must be as thin as a strand of hair. Here, cutting makes it possible to dissect and interpret strata to recreate the geological past. The cut is an act of revelation that opens onto the unknown and sets off a journey through time.

Each practitioner has a unique relationship with the cut. Precise and definitive, the cut seems to hang on a balance between instinct, experience, and knowledge. It bears witness to an intention, expressing a choice that requires a high level of concentration, translating the decisions made by the hands of the artisan into the material. This precision requires prior study. Surgeons never insert a scalpel without first studying the human body and practicing their movements: they only have a few seconds to make the right one. Master carpenters don’t cut wood without first observing the grain; in the kitchen, cutting food into different thicknesses impacts the cooking and flavor.

A cut can be a matter of life or death. In Japan, a delicate fish called fugu can be lethal if prepared incorrectly. Certain parts of its body contain a poison with no known antidote, so only the most experienced master sushi chefs are allowed to prepare and serve it. For those who know how to see, touch, listen, and learn, no matter their field, the cut seems to reveal a meticulous know-how that blends material and attention.

In its relationship to living things, the cut inhabits a contradiction between injury and healing. It’s responsible for destruction (land devastation, hunting, deforestation), but is also necessary for cultivation and harvest; when cutting takes the form of pruning, it’s viewed by gardeners as destruction that is necessary for a plant’s growth and longevity.

Nathalie, a winegrower on the Plateau de Blu in Champagne, tells me about her work in the vineyard. Her winter begins with the painstaking task of pruning, which lasts several months. “We wait for winter so the sap will have gone down into the trunk, so we don’t damage it. We cut just above the last bud. It’s like a wound, yes, but one that allows the vine to continue growing.” When spring arrives, the sap goes up: the vine weeps, as they say. “If we cut it then, it’d be impossible to stop the flow.” Then summer comes, and grapes hang heavy on the vine. At harvest time, Nathalie relieves the vine of the weight. Cutting is part of the regeneration cycle and highlights the vital force that animates living things.

The cut also punctuates the human life cycle, starting with the first cut that frees us from our mothers at birth. Existence is then punctuated by numerous cuts, both real and symbolic: in the body, in the mind, emancipation, distant ties, liberation, and loss. In Greek mythology, the scissors of Atropos, the third sister of the Fates (the triad responsible for order and human destiny), are used to count down the days and cut the threads of lives.

In psychology, the cut is presented as fundamental to our psychic development. Freud emphasizes that it’s through the imaginary division between self and other, beginning with child and mother, that each individual obtains the space of desire necessary to inhabit his or her own subjectivity, and exist.

The cut seems to bring order to the human psyche. There is always a before and an after. It’s an omen of a change in status, of the passage from one state to another. Indeed, it’s part of many rituals that mark various stages in individual and collective life. The tangible change evokes different symbols and meanings depending on the culture. For example, cutting one’s hair plays an important part in initiation processes and transitions. Whether it’s the garçonne haircut associated with feminist movements or long braids cut off as a sign of mourning in some Native American tribes, hair, sensual and magnetic, can be cut to express grief or separation from a group. The cutting of the wedding cake has its origins in a Roman tradition in which the bride cut bread with a sword, with her husband’s hands placed on her own, to ensure a happy marriage and seal a new union. Whether it’s cutting ribbons with scissors at opening ceremonies or sharing food to strengthen community ties, cutting marks the symbolic destruction of what was, liberating one thing from another, and opening new chapters. It’s in the background of social transformations, helping to establish a certain structure and coherence in the world.

Paradoxically, for collage artists, cutting is first and foremost about collection and preservation. It involves taking what you want to keep from “a world that others have created.” Magazine clippings – fragments of textures and images – are separated and detached from their original context. In this way, disparate elements become autonomous, are freed from their initial meaning, and can reorganized into new compositions. In collage, new meanings are constructed by destroying old ones. The detachment caused by cutting is, at its heart, about reorganization and the sharp ability of our consciousness to limit, liberate, arbitrate, and take drastic measures.

In the practice of film editing, the editor, a hunter of emotions, scans the raw footage looking for moments to keep. “In general, the first cuts are the most instinctive. I choose without thinking too much. I choose what I feel is the most powerful and emotional, what seems obvious and seductive at first glance.” Whether it’s the manual and tactile gesture of decisive “mark cuts,” originally made on film marked with white numbers, or today’s digital cuts, the gesture is the same and involves much more than just removing scenes. The cut separates and punctuates a flow of images to set a pace, invent, and, ultimately, tell a story. In film editing, cutting means slicing through the tangled and superfluous to shape a narrative into its essence. The last stage of writing a film is the cuts made during editing. Some editors try to make them invisible “to evoke, through editing, the feeling of a continuous shot, often considered the highest art of the cinematographic language.” Others play with breath with the goal of surprising the viewer, enjoying the phenomenon of association of ideas. “Captivated by the story, moved by the characters, the viewer doesn’t notice the cuts. Their brain recreates the images missing between one shot and the next extremely quickly.” The meaning of the film emerges from the shape of the cuts.

Indeed, with no breaks, reality would be simply a constant flow of things that escape our understanding. Walter Murch, a film editor for Francis Ford Coppola, examines the relationship between editing and blinking in his book In the Blink of an Eye. He discovers that we blink both for physiological reasons, to “moisten the surface of the eye,” and for psychological reasons. Because the visible – like the audible and readable – needs punctuation: “We blink to separate. We must render visual reality discontinuous, otherwise perceived reality would resemble an almost incomprehensible string of letters without word separation or punctuation.”

The cut provides a pause and opens a space to breathe. Artist Lucio Fontana’s famous slashed canvases raise awareness of the conceptual implications of the cut. For him, the cut was not destructive, but rather a spatial exploration. It was an act of revelation. With his famous slashes, he wished to pierce the surface of the canvas to access the space beyond. Fascinated by the void, Lucio Fontana made cuts to open a passage toward infinity.

In the frozen landscapes of Greenland, the cut also opens a passage. Before the country was converted to Christianity, Inuit peoples had a specific cutting practice. In funeral rituals, it was customary to use an animal skin, usually seal, as a shroud.
A small incision was made in the center. This incision, also found on shamans’ ceremonial clothing, allowed the soul of the deceased (anirniq = breath) to pass from the world of the living to the world of the dead, and allowed the shaman to travel between the real world and the magical world.

There is infinite beauty in the cut. Wounds, breathing, evisceration – it contains the sensations of acute pain and yet is fundamental to the composition of the world. It creates a pause in the infinite flow of everything that composes the world, giving it shape, order, and rhythm; it opens an unlimited space for imagination and enables infinite connections. The destruction of the cut is necessary for creation.

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1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux [A thousand plateaus] (1980).
2. Ursula Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986).
3. Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, Le livre des symboles : réflexions sur des images archétypales [The book of symbols: reflections on archetypal images] (Taschen, 2011).
4. Artist Nina Fraser, quoted in Collage by Women: 50 Essential Contemporary Artists, ed. Rebeka Elizegi (Promopress, 2019).
5. Blanca Ortiga, “Wiping out Semantic Horizons,” in Collage by Women: 50 Essential Contemporary Artists, ed. Rebeka Elizegi (Promopress, 2019).
6. Noëlle Boisson, La Sagesse de la Monteuse de Film [The wisdom of the film editor] (Éditions du 81, 2019).
7. Boisson.
8. Isabelle Manquillet, “Les femmes dans l’histoire des métiers du cinéma français : focus sur les monteuses” [Women in the history of French cinema professionals: spotlight on editors], March 5, 2024, Bibliothèque du cinéma François Truffaut, Paris.
9. Boisson, 73.
10. Boisson, 72.
11. Peter Szendy, “La troisième paupière,” Libération, https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2016/06/06/la-troisieme-paupiere_1457675/.
12. Artist Jenna Kaës, interviewed by the author in 2017 during Kaës’ “Hors Pistes” residency in Greenland.

Published in: Tools Magazine, To Cut.
Translation: Maggie Oran.