In The Blink Of An Eye — Walter Murch

The Whys of Filmmaking

The whats, the hows, and the whens of filmmaking have been widely addressed over the course of hundred years of cinema, but Walter Murch’s In The Blink Of An Eye, at least for me, was about the whys of filmmaking.

Why do artists make films?

Why do filmmakers cut films?

Why do audiences across the globe watch films?

Why are audiences okay with the disruption of the narrative with a cut?

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Walter Murch is a legendary film editor, director, writer, and sound designer, having worked on some of the landmark films ever made including Apocalypse Now, Godfather I & II, The English Patient.. etc. With nine Academy Award nominations and three wins, he is often referred to as the “most respected film editor and sound designer in modern cinema”.

Picture Courtesy: AZ Quotes

The feature is not a review, a blog, or an article, but a collection of my favorite extracts from the ingenious book, In The Blink Of An Eye by Walter Murch.

Editing is not so much a putting together, but a discovery of a path. Enunciated by Murch himself “It is frequently at the edges that we learn most about the middle; ice and steam reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could.”

Each editor has to decide how to structure the narrative, which is to say when and in what order to release those various pieces of information.

Editors are not getting paid to cut, they are there to make decisions — to cut or not to. But it doesn’t make sense to not cut. The film is cut for practical reasons and the film is cut because cutting — that sudden disruption of reality — can be an effective tool in itself.

The top of the list of reasons for a cut is Emotion. What an audience finally remembers is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performance, not even the story — it’s how they felt.

An ideal cut should satisfy

• It is true to the emotion of the moment.
• It advances the story.
• It occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and ‘right’.
• Acknowledges ‘eye trace — the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame.
• It respects ‘planarity’ — the grammar to three dimensions converted into two by photography.
• It respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (relation between players and objects to one another).

And in fact in that order. The former ones are given more priority in situations that could not accommodate all the six conditions, with utmost importance is preserving the emotion, generalizing as, if the emotion is right, and the story is advancing in a unique, interesting way, in the right rhythm, the audience will tend to ignore or become unaware of the others.

Most With The Least

• Try to do the most with the least — with the emphasis on try. An attempt to produce the greatest effect in the viewer’s mind by the least number of things on the screen. Because you want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience — the suggestion is always more effective than exposition. The audience should be participants, not just mere spectators.

The editor should put himself in the place of the audience considering what the audience is thinking at the moment, where the audience is looking at the moment, what does the editor want the audience to think of at the moment, what does the audience need to think about at the moment, and what should the audience feel at the moment. Like magicians, the editor would have to focus the attention of the audience on the wrong side, to help the large unveil at the end.

The relation between a director and an editor is that of a dreamer and a listener. The dreamer would instigate a conversation with an idea, and the listener would imagine sequences (incorrect, perhaps) from the idea. As the dreamer listens to this, he would find himself protesting and the dreams are further explained by their inner memory. This is again worked on by the listener, and the cycle continues till the listener can draft out the dream sequence as imagined by the dreamer. The editor and director can play both roles here.

Why do cuts work? The instantaneous displacement achieved by the cut is not anything that we experience in ordinary life. The images in dreams are much more fragmented, intersecting in much stranger and more abrupt ways than the images of waking reality. We accept the cut because it resembles the way images are juxtaposed in our dreams. There may be a part of our walking reality where we actually do experience something like cuts, the blinking of our eyes. The blink interrupts the apparent visual continuity of our perceptions. People don't blink in continuous intervals, depending on the grip of a thought. People blink to segregate thoughts if multiple tend to be happening at the same time. The blink is more geared to the emotional state, nature, and frequency of our thoughts, than to the atmospheric environment. A blink could happen in real life, where a cut could happen in a film. An idea, or a linked sequence of ideas. We blink to separate and punctuate the ideas. Similarly, in films, a cut is made where we want to bring an idea to end and start something new. The cut by itself does not create the blink moment, but if the cut is well-placed, the more the effect of the punctuation will be.

If an actor is successful at projecting himself into the emotions and thoughts of a character, his/her blinks will naturally and spontaneously occur at the point that the character’s blinks would have occurred in real life. Thereby, the editor can align the cut points with the blink points.

Every shot has potential ‘cut points’, and once you have identified them, you will choose different points depending on what the audience has been thinking up to that moment and what you want them to think next. First, by cutting away from a certain character before he finishes speaking, the editor encourages the audience to think only about the face value of what the character said. Second, if the editor decides to linger on the character after the character finishes speaking, the editor wants the audience to judge what the character said from their eyes (the character was probably lying).

Three factors while cutting

• Identifying a series of potential cut points (comparisons with the blink can help).
• Determining what effect each cut point will have on the audience, and
• Choosing which of those effects is the correct one for the film.

Rhythm and rate should depend on what the audience is watching at the moment. A fight scene can have 25 cuts per min, whereas a dialogue scene can have 6 cuts per min.

William Stokoe makes an intriguing comparison between the techniques of editing and American Sign Language “In sign language, the narrative is no longer linear. Instead, the essence is to cut from a normal view to a close-up of a distant shot to a close-up again, even including flashback and flash-forward scenes, exactly as a movie editor works” — William Stokoe, Language in Four Dimensions.

Television is a “look-at” medium, while cinema is a “look-into” medium.

• One of the functions of music videos and commercials is to attract your attention and keep it. While watching television, you’re usually looking at a small screen some distance away for a short period of time. Visual competition is all around: The lights are on, the phone may be ringing, you might be in a supermarket or department store. Television has to make things collide within that tiny frame in order to catch your attention because of the much narrower angle than the image subtends compared to theatrical film — hence the quick cuts, jump cuts, swish pans, staggering action, etc
• There’s a completely different aesthetic when you’re in a theater: The screen is huge, everything else in the room is dark, there are (hopefully) no distractions, you are there for at least two hours; you can’t stop the film at your convenience. And so, understandably, feature editing has to be paced differently than a music video or commercial editing.

The Digital Future

• The sound editor naturally moves forward through the film in “horizontal” time — one sound follows another. But the editor also has to think vertically, which is to say, “What sounds are happening at the same time?” There might be, for example, the background sound of a freeway along with birds singing, a plane passing overhead, footsteps of pedestrians, etc. Each of these is a separate layer of sound, and the beauty of the sound editor’s work, like a musician’s, is the creation and integration of a multidimensional tapestry of sound.
• The film editors, who have been only thinking in a horizontal manner, will start considering vertical editing as well with “What can I edit within the frame?”
• Special effects and animation will be introduced into frames, with the ability to remove unnecessary elements as well (like cables, during a stunt scene).

The paradox of cinema is that it is most effective when it seems to fuse two contradictory elements — the general and the personal — into a kind of mass intimacy. The work itself is unchanging, aimed at an audience of millions, and yet — when it works — a film seems to speak to each member of the audience in a powerfully personal way. The origins of this power are mysterious, but I believe they come from two of the primary characteristics of motion pictures: that it is a theater of thought and that it is a collaborative art.

Alfred Hitchcock

“The film is already made in my head before we start shooting.”

Francis Ford Coppola:

“The director is the ringmaster of a circus that is inventing itself.”

The film is a dramatic construction in which, for the first time in history, characters can be seen to think at even the subtlest level, and these thoughts can then be choreographed. Sometimes these thoughts are almost physically visible, moving across the faces of talented actors like clouds across the sky. This is made possible by two techniques that lie at the foundation of cinema itself: the closeup, which renders such subtlety visible, and the cut — the sudden switch from one image to another — which mimics the acrobatic nature of thought itself.

What will cinema — the habit of seeing motion pictures in a theatrical setting- what will cinema be like in 2099?

“I’ll come down on the affirmative side and say that cinema will be with us a hundred years from now.” Its persistence will be fueled by the unchanging human need for stories in the dark, and its evolution will be sparked by technical revolutions.