Telling a story is all about what you should say and what you shouldn't.
When a filmmaker decides to shut up and let the film do the talking, well that's an ellipses.
This is an ellipses.
In general, the main reason for doing it is to avoid over explaining to the audience.
If the director goes even one step too far
it could feel boring and redundant.
Another function of the ellipses is the show the passage of time.
Let's see how David Fincher uses the ellipses in a film that speaks precisely about time.
But of course there are many reasons why a director might use an ellipses
One director who knew better than anyone the power of this tool was Ernst Lubitsch.
The European director, undoubtedly one of the great masters of film,
perfected the comic use of the ellipses.
And in the age of the Hays Code he often used it to avoid problems with the censors.
One more?
Look at how John Carpenter makes a metalinguistic employment of the ellipses in Big Trouble in Little China.
But perhaps the most famous ellipses in history is the one Kubrick employed in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
With a simple match cut, Kubrick fast forwards the entire evolution of the human species.
To imagine the span of time is almost impossible, but let's do an exercise:
Think about the films that have narrated the history of humankind and let's fill in the ellipses with them.
Maybe in this way we might understand what Kubrick achieved with this simple cut.