Identical or similar shots frame the beginning and end of a sequence — creates compositional closure and emphasizes thematic cycles.
Anyone cutting a sequence and noticing that the opening shot and the finale mirror each other is already working with a bracketing function — whether consciously or intuitively. In editing, this is one of the most subtle techniques to give the viewer the feeling that a story has completed itself. You frame a scene or an entire act with visual or compositional anchors that repeat or clearly correspond at the beginning and end.
Practical application: You might begin a sequence with a wide shot of a character standing alone in a room — window behind them, grayish light. After five minutes of narrative time, after conflicts and internal shifts, you end the sequence with the same camera perspective, the same room — but the character is now sitting, the light has changed, or the emotional burden is visible. The external form is the same; the internal state contradicts it. This is powerful because it tells the story without dialogue.
In documentary filmmaking, this works similarly: You open with an establishing shot — market, bustle, morning light — and close your story with the same location, but under different conditions. Audiences immediately grasp that a cycle has been completed, even if the editing itself doesn't have to indicate it. The eye notices it.
Technically, when editing, you have to meticulously search your raw footage for matches: same angles, similar composition, comparable image division. Often, such matching shots are deliberately filmed on set — the DoP and director know that the first and last shots of a sequence are intended to correspond. Sometimes, you also recombine material in the edit that wasn't explicitly shot for this purpose, but the similarity still works.
Related to this is cyclical montage, but while that tends to focus on repeated actions, the bracketing function works with static or quasi-static imagery — it frames, it holds, it closes. The silence between the first and last shot is the narrative space in between. Subtle, but incredibly effective in longer films or focused scenes.