Match cut

A cut between two shots that share a shape or a motion, so the eye glides across the join. The seam becomes a rhyme.

A match cut rhymes two shots: a shape, a motion or a gesture carried across the join, so the eye glides where it would have stumbled. The bone becomes the ship, the blown match becomes the desert sun, and in the glide the film asserts a connection deeper than sequence.

The rhyme is an argument: match two things and the audience reads them as versions of each other, across any distance of time or space. That is why the great match cuts compress whole themes into one join. The craft is exactness, of position, scale and vector, because a near-match reads as accident, and only a true match reads as meaning.