In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing
by Walter Murch
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing:
“Most of us are searching-consciously or unconsciously- for a degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world, and if we happen to become aware-like Stravinsky- of a volcano within us, we will compensate by urging restraint. By that same token, someone who bore a glacier within them might urge passionate abandon. The danger is, as Bergman points out, that a glacial personality in need of passionate abandon may read Stravinsky and apply restraint instead.”
“What I’m suggesting is a list of priorities. If you have to give up something, don’t ever give up emotion before story. Don’t give up story before rhythm, don’t give up rhythm before eye-trace, don’t give up eye-trace before planarity, and don’t give up planarity before spatial continuity.”
“The underlying principle: Always try to do the most with the least—with the emphasis on try. You may not always succeed, but attempt to produce the greatest effect in the viewer’s mind by the least number of things on screen. Why? Because you want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience—suggestion is always more effective than exposition. Past a certain point, the more effort you put into wealth of detail, the more you encourage the audience to become spectators rather than participants. The same principle applies to all the various crafts of filmmaking: acting, art direction, photography, music, costume, etc.”
“When people are deeply “in” a film, you’ll notice that nobody coughs at certain moments, even though they may have a cold. If the coughing were purely autonomic response to smoke or congestion, it would be randomly constant, no matter what was happening on screen. But the audience holds back at certain moments, and I’m suggesting blinking is something like coughing in this sense. There is a famous live recording of pianist Sviatoslav Richter playing Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition during a flu epidemic in Bulgaria many years ago. It is just as plain as day what’s going on: While he was playing certain passages, no one coughed. At those moments, he was able to suppress, with his artistry, the coughing impulse of 1,500 sick people.”
“So we entertain an idea, or a linked sequence of ideas, and we blink to separate and punctuate that idea from what follows. Similarly—in film—a shot presents us with an idea, or a sequence of ideas, and the cut is a “blink” that separates and punctuates those ideas.16 At the moment you decide to cut, what you are saying is, in effect, “I am going to bring this idea to an end and start something new.” It is important to emphasize that the cut by itself does not create the “blink moment”—the tail does not wag the dog. If the cut is well-placed, however, the more extreme the visual discontinuity—from dark interior to bright exterior, for instance—the more thorough the effect of punctuation will be.”
“the blink is either something that helps an internal separation of thought to take place, or it is an involuntary reflex accompanying the mental separation that is taking place anyway.”
“Let’s say that the average age in the audience is twenty-five years. Six hundred times twenty-five equals fifteen thousand years of human experience assembled in that darkness—well over twice the length of recorded human history of hopes, dreams, disappointments, exultation, tragedy. All focused on the same series of images and sounds, all brought there by the urge, however inchoate, to open up and experience as intensely as possible something beyond their ordinary lives.”
“The theatrical/cinematic experience is really born the moment someone says, “Let’s go out.” What is implicit in this phrase is a dissatisfaction with one’s familiar surroundings and the corresponding need to open oneself up in an uncontrolled way to something “other.” And here we have the battle between motion pictures in the home and cinema, for I’ll venture that the true cinematic experience can’t be had in the home, no matter how technically advanced the equipment becomes.”
“You ask for something specific and that thing—that thing alone—is delivered to you as quickly as possible. You are only shown what you ask for. The Avid is faster at it than the Moviola, but the process is the same.That’s a drawback for me because your choices can then only be as good as your requests, and sometimes that is not enough. There is a higher level that comes through recognition: You may not be able to articulate what you want, but you can recognize it when you see it.What do I mean by that? Well, if you learn to speak a foreign language, you will find that there is a gap between how well you can speak it and how well you can understand it when it is spoken to you. A human being’s ability to understand a foreign language is always greater than his ability to speak it.And when you make a film, you are trying to learn a foreign language—it just happens to be a unique language that is only spoken by this one film. If you have to articulate everything, as you do with a ran-dom-access system like video/computer or Moviola/ assistant, you are limited by what and how much you can articulate and how good your original notes were. Whereas the advantage of the KEM’s linear system is that I do not always have to be speaking to it—there are times when it speaks to me. The system is constantly presenting things for consideration, and a sort of dialogue takes place. I might say, “I want to see that close-up of Teresa, number 317, in roll 45.” But I’ll put that roll on the machine, and as I spool down to number 317 (which may be hundreds of feet from the start), the machine shows me everything at high speed down to that point, saying in effect: “How about this instead? Or this?” And I find, more often than not, long before I get down to shot 317, that I’ve had three other ideas triggered by the material that I have seen flashing by me.”
“But first I'd like to take a moment to emphasize the astronomical number of ways that images can be combined in a motion picture. This has always been the case, no matter what editing system is used: manual, mechanical, or electronic. If a scene is photographed with only two shots - one each from two different camera positions (A and B, let's say)-you can choose one or the other or a combination of both. As a result, you have at least four ways of using these two images: A, B, A+B, and B+A. However, once the number gets much larger than two shots-and a director might shoot twenty-five shots for an average scene-the number of possible combinations quickly becomes astronomical.”
“Sometimes, though, you can get caught up in the details and lose track of the overview. When that happens to me, it is usually because I have been looking at the image as the miniature it is in the editing room, rather than seeing it as the mural that it will become when projected in a theater. Something that will quickly restore the correct perspective is to imagine yourself very small, and the screen very large, and pretend that you are watching the finished film in a thousand-seat theater filled with people, and that the film is beyond the possibility of any further changes. If you still like what you see, it is probably okay. If not, you will now most likely have a better idea of how to correct the problem, whatever it is. One of the tricks I use to help me achieve this perspective is to cut out little paper dolls—a man and a woman— and put one on each side of the editing screen: The size of the dolls (a few inches high) is proportionately correct to make the screen seem as if it is thirty feet wide.”
“The cinematic experience is a recreation of this ancient practice of theatrical renewal and bonding in modern terms, except that the flames of the stone-age campfire have been replaced by the shifting images that are telling the story itself. Images that dance the same way every time the film is projected, but which kindle different dreams in the mind of each beholder. It is a fusion of the permanency of literature with the spontaneity of theater.”
“one of the central responsibilities of the editor, which is to establish an interesting, coherent rhythm of emotion and thought — on the tiniest and the largest scales — that allows the audience to trust, to give themselves to the film.”
“Here we are in the domain of the human spirit: what do you want to say and how do you want to say it? One hundred eighty years ago, Balzac wrote eighty classic novels in twenty years, using just a quill pen. Who among our word-processing writers today can even approach such a record? In the 1930s, Jean Renoir made a commercially successful feature film (On Purge Bébé) in three weeks—from concept to finished product. And early in his career, Kurosawa— directing and editing himself—would have the first cut of his films done two days after shooting.”
“So it seems to me that our rate of blinking is somehow geared more to our emotional state and to the nature and frequency of our thoughts than to the atmospheric environment we happen to find ourselves in.”
“We still know so little about the nature of dreams that the observation comes to a stop once it has been made.”
“as well as in our own thoughts—the way one realization will suddenly overwhelm everything else, to be, in turn, replaced by yet another.”
“you can only have faith that what you are doing is the right thing.”
“What can you learn from the differences between the previous screenings and this one? Given these two headings, where is the North Pole? Test screenings are just a way to find out where you are.”
“You are actually doing creative work, and you may find what you really want rather than what you thought you wanted.”
“your choices can then only be as good as your requests, and sometimes that is not enough. There is a higher level that comes through recognition: You may not be able to articulate what you want, but you can recognize it when you see it.”
“so it is the editor’s job to propose alternate scenarios as bait to encourage the sleeping dream to rise to its defense and thus reveal itself more fully. And these scenarios unfold themselves at the largest level (should such-and-such a scene be removed from the film for the good of the whole?) and at the most detailed (should this shot end on this frame or 1/24th of a second later on the next frame?). But sometimes it is the editor who is the dreamer and the director who is the listener, and it is he who now offers the bait to tempt the collective dream to reveal more of itself. As any fisherman can tell you, it is the quality of the bait that determines the kind of fish you catch.”
“This revelation about bi-planes and elephants can in turn prompt the listener to elaborate another improvisation, which will coax out another aspect of the hidden dream, and so on, until as much of the dream is revealed as possible”
“In other words, the dream itself, hidden in the memory, rises to its own defense when it hears itself being challenged by an alternate version, and so reveals itself.”
“And so you try as hard as you can to separate out what you wish from what is actually there, never abandoning your ultimate dreams for the film, but trying as hard as you can to see what is actually on the screen.”
“Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom.”
“What they finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story—it’s how they felt.”
“the quality of the sounds, and how capable the blend of those sounds was of exciting emotions hidden in the hearts of the audience.”
“one way of looking at the process of making a film is to think of it as the search to identify what—for the particular film you are working on—is a uniquely “bad bit.” So, the editor embarks on the search to identify these “bad bits” and cut them out, provided that doing so does not disrupt the structure of the “good bits” that are left.”
“discontinuity also allows us to choose the best camera angle for each emotion and story point, which we can edit together for a cumulatively greater impact.”
