Cutting film taught me that clock time and lived time are different things

I cut documentaries in Tehran. A shot of a woman pouring tea can last eight seconds and feel like a minute, or last eight seconds and pass unnoticed, depending on what came before it. Every editor knows this. The clock and the viewer disagree constantly, and my job is to manage the disagreement.

Bergson built a philosophy on that disagreement. In Time and Free Will he distinguished time as measured, a line of homogeneous instants laid out like points in space, from durée, duration, time as lived, where moments interpenetrate and each carries the others. For Bergson, clock time is a spatialised abstraction; duration is the real thing.

What I find in the edit suite is more complicated. Duration is real, yes, but it is not only private. Audiences in different countries feel the same cut as long or short in similar ways. Eisenstein thought montage could produce meaning that neither shot contains alone, and I think it produces time that neither shot contains alone as well.

I am not sure what this proves philosophically. Perhaps only that Augustine was half right when he said we measure time in the mind: we do, but the mind can be shaped from outside, which is what editors are paid for. Musicians, actors, anyone else who works with time as a material: does this match what you find?