Throughout the history of film making, directors have searched for a way to easily convey an idea, parallel or theme to an audience without having to come out and explicitly say it in the dialogue or narration. One tool which revolutionized this process is the match cut, or the pairing of two similar objects in both shape and position within the frame across two separate but chronological shots. The match cut allows for the viewer to easily infer the correlation between shot 1 and shot 2, allowing the nuances of the directors overall vision for the film to be interpreted easily and subtly by the audience. Looking back over the past several decades of film and television, the match cut has been used in thousands of instances for several different purposes.Perhaps the most iconic of all match cuts comes from legendary director Stanley Kubrick in his visionary film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the first shot of the match cut, we see a bone, used as a crude tool by the apes in the film to kill other apes and defend their territory, cast in the air. The camera zooms in to a point where it seems as if the bone is almost floating. The image then jumps to a white, slender space craft (just as the bone is white and slender), hovering in similar position against the black, star-filled background. This match cut allows for Kubrick to equate today’s technology to the ancient tools of our ape ancestors, capable of both helping us as a species to advance our goals and destroying each other along the way. This theme of utility vs. destruction continues throughout the film, as it was effectively established during this open scene.Match cuts are also useful for directors when trying to establish the aging of a character. A young boy or girl with a unique feature to the main actor or actress, such as baby blue eyes, can simply be shown in the same position in the frame, leading the audience to infer that this is the same character after several years have passed, without having to risk complex makeup schemes.