'In the Blink of an Eye'

“Why do cuts work?” is the main question in Walter Murch’s book In the Blink of an Eye, and it’s a very intriguing question. In the book, Murch explains how at first glance the way film is cut today just shouldn’t work. It’s simply not how we perceive things in everyday life, jumping around from place to place in a discontinuous way. So, how come the way we edit films actually works? His answer is equally intriguing.

My favorite finding in the book was the relation between film and dreams. Personally, the best thing about films is the ability to go to unreal places, live totally different lives and experience things you otherwise would never experience, it’s all very dreamlike. I’ve always considered movies a way to go into another realm, but I never considered its similarities to the dream realm. “And the images in dreams are much more fragmented,” explains Murch (page 58), “Intersecting in much stranger and abrupt ways than the images of waking reality — ways that approximate, at least, the interaction produced by cutting.” Part of the reason cuts work is because they put audiences in a dream-like state. Set in a different world from the perspective of a different person cut with images that don’t quite fit perfectly together yet still in a sense to keep you drawn in is how editors put the audience in an experience similar to a dream, and in the end, isn’t that what we want from a movie? To experience something new, possibly outrageous, and leave our lives behind for just a few moments.

From dreams, the book continues on to blinking. My very first editing class my teacher had said, “Cut where you blink,” it seemed like an odd thing at first, but after a few cuts I couldn’t think of a better way to choose, the placement of the cuts seemed to flow so smoothly. In his book, Walter Murch wrote about a similar way of editing and seeing film. He had mentioned that while editing the film The Conversation, the actor seemed to blink right where he put the edits and how peculiar it had seemed at first. After some thought and observation Murch discovered the emotion of blinking and how we, as human beings, edit our lives through blinks. At one point Murch reveals a concept of using blinks to determine if the audience is feeling the emotion intended by the filmmakers and if they are universally having those feeling together, it would be a very interesting experiment that I’d love to see take place. Understanding his discovery can open up a whole new world of understanding why cut points work and how to place them effectively. The concept editing to blinks is the same as editing to emotion — it’s just that the blinks are what give away emotion or understanding.

While it’s important to understand the emotion and be able to create a feeling in the audience it’s still important that an editor be logical. I’ve always thought an editor should be able to think logically and problem-solve; to be able make a story understandable, to get others to feel a certain emotion, to work civilly with people who have different ideas (in cases where there are multiple editors), and to set aside emotions pre-established by the film and the people who made it and, as Murch puts it, “see past the edge of the frame.”

Overall, I really enjoyed Murch’s book. I found his ideas and observations interesting and unique. He’s opened my mind to think of editing in new ways and given me ideas to refine my own process. In the Blink of an Eye will definitely be a book that I will keep referring back to in my editing career.