Match cut

Indeed, rather than the seamless cuts of continuity editing within a scene, the term "graphic match" usually denotes a more conspicuous transition between (or comparison of) two shots via pictorial elements.

An early Hollywood example of the technique is the dream sequence in Buster Keaton's 1924 fourth feature film, Sherlock Jr..

The scene contains a number of match cuts as the protagonist's surroundings change sharply around him several times: at one point he dives off a rock into the sea but lands in a pile of snow on a hillside.

Another early example is Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which opens with a series of match dissolves that keeps the titular character's lit window in the same part of the frame while the cuts take viewers around his dilapidated Xanadu estate, before a final match dissolve takes viewers from the outside to the inside where Kane is dying.

Lang reused the technique in M while cross cutting between the meetings of Schränker's criminal union and Inspector Karl Lohmann's homicide investigation squad.

Schränker and Lohmann are matched in movement and in dialogue (which is carried over the cut to form a coherent phrase) to illustrate their unlikely connection in a shared goal, to capture a serial child killer.

[citation needed] The "Morning in America" campaign commercial for US President Ronald Reagan's successful 1984 re-election bid also uses this technique.

For his 1986 fantasy film Highlander, director Russell Mulcahy employs multiple match cuts to indicate movements backwards in time and forwards again to the present day, telling the story of an immortal who relives episodes from his past in the ancient Highlands of Scotland (and later across Europe), as he faces his final challenge in modern New York City.

Yet another example of a match cut can be found in the final episode of the first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost's television show Twin Peaks.