The editors of Fantastic Machine (#27) say they cut for composition, not dramatic arc, and describe two structures running together: a historical one starting in 1828 and a looser, associative one. Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (#6) is the older case of a film whose shape is made in the edit.
A video to make: cut three minutes of found footage twice, once in date order and once by association, and show both to a few people. Ask where each one lost them.
By Raz Rotenberg, made with AI