In the Blink of an Eye

by Walter Murch

A revised transcription of a lecture on film editing given by Walter Murch

in the mixing theater at Spectrum Films, Sydney, Australia, in October 1988

Preface

“Igor Stravinsky loved expressing himself and wrote a good deal on interpretation. As he
bore a volcano within him, he urged restraint. Those without even the vestige of a
volcano within them nodded in agreement, raised their baton, and observed restraint,
while Stravinsky himself conducted his own Apollon Musagéte as if it were Tchaikovsky.
We who had read him listened and were astonished.”
- The Magic Lantern by Ingmar Bergman

Many of the thoughts that follow, although presented to the public in a lecture, are more truly
cautionary notes to myself, working methods I have developed for coping with my own particular
volcanoes (and glaciers).
- Walter Murch
Cuts and Shadow Cuts

It is frequently at the edges of things that we learn most about the middle: ice and steam can
reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could.

Apocalypse Now is a film that qualifies as the cinematic equivalent of ice and steam: length,
budget, artistic ambition, technical innovation. Averaged out to 1.47 cuts per day (“normal” films
around 8 cuts/day). Reveals that editing is not so much a putting together as it is a discovery of
a path.

Why Do Cuts Work

Cuts work even though they are a displacement of one field of vision, time, and/or space with
another. It could have easily been otherwise; nothing in our day-to-day experience in the history
of humanity has prepared us for such a thing. Our reality is continuously linear. If cuts didn’t
work, single take films would be the norm. Luckily for ease of production, this isn’t the case.
Cuts do work unless they are displacements that are neither subtle nor total, such as cutting
from a wide shot to a slightly less wide shot of the same angle.

A beehive can apparently be moved two inches each night without disorienting the bees
the next morning. Surprisingly, if it is moved two miles, the bees also have no problem:
They are forced by the total displacement of their environment to re-orient their sense of
direction, which they can do easily enough. But if the hive is moved two yards, the bees
will become fatally confused. The environment does not seem different to them, so they
do not re-orient themselves, and as a result, they will not recognize their own hive when
they return from foraging, hovering instead in the empty space where the hive used to
be, while the hive itself sits just two yards away.

Visual discontinuity - although not in the temporal sense - is the most striking feature of
Ancient Egyptian painting. Each part of the human body was represented by its most
characteristic and revealing angle: head in profile, shoulders frontal, arms and legs in
profile, torso frontal, and then all these different angles were combined in one figure. To
us today, with our preference for the unifying laws of perspective, this gives an almost
comic “twisted” look to the people of Ancient Egypt - but it may be that in some remote
future, our films, with their combination of many different angles (each being the most
“revealing” for its particular subject), will look just as comic and twisted.

US: film is “cut,” emphasizing separation. Australia & Great Britain: film is “joined,”
emphasizing bringing together.
Cut Out the Bad Bits

Editing is cutting out the bad bits (a description Murch used to hate but has come to respect).
You should identify what are the bad bits to your specific film - what is bad in one film may be
good in another - and cut them out, provided that doing so does not disrupt the structure of the
“good bits” that are left.

The DNA between chimpanzees and humans are 99% identical. Biologists were baffled when
they discovered this and were forced to realize that there must be something else controlling the
order in which the various pieces of information stored in DNA would be activated that created
such differences between the two species. Example: Hard skull versus larger brain. Developing
chimpanzees develop a harder skull first (probably because of their harsher environment) and
their brain can only fill up that space. In humans, priority lies in the brain first, maximizing the
size of the brain.

The information in DNA is an uncut film, and a chimpanzee and human are different films from
the same footage. How you put it together creates a completely different species that is
appropriate to its own environment. Don’t start making a chimpanzee film and then decide to
turn it into a human instead.

Most with the Least

You want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience - suggestion is
always more effective than exposition. Don’t encourage the audience to be spectators versus
participants. The editor is like a tour guide: don’t over-do pointing things out, but let me see what
I see. Frequently, it takes more work to decide where not to cut. You are making a 24 decisions
a second: “No. No. No. No. No. No… Yes!”

The Rule of Six

Walter Murch’s list of what’s most important when making a cut:

1. Emotion - 51% - It is true to the emotion of the moment
2. Story - 23% - It advances the story
3. Rhythm - 10% - It occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and ‘right’
4. Eye-trace - 7% - It acknowledges the location/movement of focus within the frame
5. Two-D Plane of Screen - %5 - It respects ‘planarity’ (the questions of stage-line)
6. Three-D Space of Action - %4 - It respects 3-d continuity of actual space

An ideal cut satisfies all 6. If you can’t satisfy all, sacrifice from the bottom up. Emotion is more
important than all others combined, and story much more than the four below. The list is also
practical: if the emotion is right and the story advanced in an interesting way in the right rhythm,
the audience will tend to be unconcerned about editorial problems. You will find that emotion,
story, and rhythm are tightly connected and usually found in the same cut.
Misdirection

An editor is an everyday working magician in that she creates misdirection. What is the
audience feeling? What should they be thinking? Where should they be looking?
Sometimes you get caught up in the details, so try to put yourself in the audience’s perspective.
Murch likes to do this by cutting out little paper people and putting one on the each side of the
monitor to help imagine that it is the finished film playing in a theater.

Seeing Around the Edge of the Frame

Knowing what happened on set can blind you from seeing potential possibilities from the dailies.
Try to see what’s on screen as the audience will, forgetting what you might know about how
expensive it was to get a shot or how stressed everyone was during a scene. Only see what’s in
the frame, nothing around and no emotions attached to it. Separate what you wish was there
from what is actually there and see what is actually on the screen. The director will be closest
connected with everything that went on behind every shot. He needs a break between shooting
and editing.

Fred Zinnemann would go climbing in the Alps after the end of shooting, just to put himself in a
potentially life-threatening situation where he had to be there, not day-dreaming about the film’s
problems.

Dreaming in Paris

In dream therapy, a dreamer meets with a listener and they go over the previous night’s dream.
The dreamer only remembers there was an airplane.
Listener: “It must have been an airliner flying over Tahiti.”
Dreamer: “No, it was a biplane, flying over the battlefields of France, and Hannibal was shooting
arrows at it from his legion of elephants.”
The memory rises to its own defense when challenged by an alternate version and reveals
itself.

The director is the dreamer, and the editor the listener, proposing scenarios as bait for the
director’s vision to reveal itself. Sometimes the rolls are switched and the director offers 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.
Team Work: Multiple Editors

Advantage: Speed / Can help when a single editor has a locked viewpoint
Disadvantage: Lack of coherence

The Decisive Moment

Murch takes a photo from each set up (camera position) as a representation that sums up the
essence of the shot, aka the ‘decisive moment’ (complex movements required more than one
photo). He puts them into panels according to scenes.
- Helps in discussing what/how it was shot with director
- Provides records of details for continuity
- Publicity
- Photos collided against each other in interesting ways. Panels juxtaposed frames that
were never meant to go together. Helps think outside the box.
- Provided hieroglyphs for an emotional language. Emotions hard to define are
represented in photos. Director can point and say, “I want more of that!”
Looking at dailies is like a casting session; eventually your mind glosses over. Picking out stills
keep your mind fresh as dailies come in and you will start thinking differently, more analytically,
for each shot.

Methods and Machines: Marble and Clay

Murch edits standing up. Editing is a kind of surgery - and have you ever seen a surgeon sitting
to perform an operation? Editing is also like cooking - and no one sits down at the stove to cook.
But most of all, editing is a kind of dance - the finished film is a kind of crystallized dance - and
when have you ever seen a dancer sitting down to dance?

3 Different systems Murch has used: Moviola, Steenbeck or KEM, and AVID. Moviola is like
clay: you add pieces to until there’s a final product. KEM is like a marble: you chip away until the
final is left. AVID and digital editing is most like the Moviola. You have random access to all of
the footage (with the Moviola, AE would grab the reel you wanted) which is a slight drawback.
With the KEM system, you had a linear access, where you had to go through all the film
in-between where you were and what you wanted.

If you learn to speak a foreign language, you will find that your ability to understand it is always
greater than your ability to speak it. When you make a film, you are trying to learn a foreign
language only spoken by this one film. If you have to articulate everything, you are limited by
what you know. The advantage of the KEM’s linear system is that it speaks back. You might say
you want to see that close up in roll 45, but when you go to it, the machine shows you
everything in between at high speed saying “How about this instead? Or this?” More often than
not, before he’d get to the shot he wanted, Murch would have three ideas triggered by the
material he saw flashing by. He would recognize something as a possibility whereas he couldn’t
articulate it as a choice.

Moviola
Description: http://everything2.com/title/Moviola
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP5A0AC-wEQ
in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcCmwkt--1g
https://youtu.be/9emTyMfEtJc?t=23m50s (23:50-29:20)

Steenbeck or KEMs
Description:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatbed_editor
Video: Demonstration -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfBPV88VWjo

Murch on his edit process:

I review dailies twice: the day after shooting as they come in, and right before I cut a
scene I review all the dailies for that scene. I make notes both times for reference.
Ideally, I’d like to have a third review of dailies after the assembly is cut, but time is
costly.

In the actual editing of a scene, I will keep on working until I can no longer “see myself”
in the material. When I review my first assembly of a scene, more often than not I can
still vividly (too vividly!) recall making the decisions that led to each of the cuts. But as
the scene is reworked and refined, it reaches a point, hopefully, where the shots
themselves seem to create each other: This shot “makes” the next shot, which “makes”
the next shot, etc. In this way, the Walter Murch who decided things initially gradually
recedes until, finally, there comes a point where he has become invisible and the
characters take over, the shots, the emotion, the story seem to take over. Sometimes -
the best times - this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I
didn’t have anything to do with that - it just created itself.”
Tests Screenings: Referred Pain

Tests screenings are helpful but be cautious; they’re tricky. Most important takeaway from them
is how you felt during them. They can help you look at the film differently. Take audience’s initial
reactions with a grain of sand.

If you go to the doctor’s with a pain in your elbow, instead of operating on it right away a good
doctor will do an x-ray, question you, study the pain, and might discover it’s from a pinched
nerve in your shoulder: a referred pain. If a test audience has a least favorite scene, your
impulse may be to “fix” that scene, but chances are the problem is elsewhere, possibly a
previous scene that didn’t properly set up this one. They are telling you where the pain is, but
not the source of the pain.

An anecdote about cutting scenes:

We decided to remove one of the scenes in the opening flashback sequences of Julia.
As I was undoing the splices, Fred Zinnemann looked thoughtfully at what was
happening and observed in an almost offhand way, “You know, when I first read this
scene in the script, I knew that I could do this film.”
I hesitated briefly, looked at him, and then continued undoing the splices. But my heart
was in my throat because at that stage in the process you do not know; you can only
have faith that what you are doing is the right thing. Were we mistakenly cutting out the
heart of the film, or were we snipping off the umbilical cord?
In retrospect, I believe it was the umbilical cord and that we were right to remove it: The
scene did have an essential function at one point, which was to connect Fred
Zinnemann to the project, but once that connection had been made and Zinnemann’s
sensibility had flowed through that scene into all the other scenes in the film, it could
finally be removed without any harm.
But things like that do give you pause.

Don’t Worry, It’s Only a Movie

We know cuts work though there’s nothing similar in reality except for dreams: a stream of
thoughts jumping around to the next. Maybe that’s why our defenses are down during a film,
because they remind us of a dream experience and our minds open up to them. It’s telling that
parents will comfort their children by saying “Don’t worry, darling, it’s only a dream” just like they
would for a film: “Don’t worry, darling, it’s only a movie,” but not as much for books, paintings, or
music.
“To me, the perfect film is as though it were unwinding behind your eyes, and your eyes
were projecting it themselves, so that you were seeing what you wished to see. Film is
like thought. It’s the closest thought process of any art.
“Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now
look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts. After the
 first look, you know that there’s no reason to pan continuously from me to the lamp
because you know what’s in between. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the
lamp. Cut. Then you behold me.”
- John Huston, Christian Science Monitor, August 11,
1973, interviewed by Louise Sweeney

A blink is a physical cut in our visual continuity. Biology teaches that we blink to moisten the eye,
but then for each environment there’d be a purely mechanical predictable interval between
blinks depending on humidity, wind, etc. But sometimes someone is so angry they don’t blink
because a single thought holds him. Or he is so angry and blinks madly because there are so
many conflicting emotions and thoughts. 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. In a conversation, someone will blink at the moment a
cut would have happened if it had been filmed. A blink, and a cut, is a punctuation that helps us
make sense of reality rather than experiencing life as a long run-on sentence.

The cut itself does not create the blink; the tail does not wag the dog. With a well-placed cut, the
more extreme the visual discontinuity, the more thorough the effect of punctuation will be.

William Stokoe makes an intriguing comparison between the techniques of film editing
and American Sign Language: “In signed language, narrative is no longer linear. Instead,
the essence is to cut from a normal view to a close-up to a distant shot to a close-up
again, even including flashback and flash-forward scenes, exactly as a movie editor
works. Not only is singing arranged more like edited film than like written narration, but
also each signer is placed very much as a camera: the field of vision and angle of view
are directed but variable” William Stokoe, Language in Four Dimensions, New York
Academy of Sciences (1979).

Dragnet

Blinks refer to the rhythm and sequence of our inner emotions and thoughts; they are insights
into our inner selves. Successful actors fully take on the thoughts of the character and would
blink when the character would. Bad acting can be caused by other thoughts (e.g. trying to
remember a line) causing the actor to blink at times that don’t match the character.

Murch finds cuts by hitting ‘stop’ at 24fps when it feels right and when he can hit the same frame
repeatedly, he knows it’s a good cut. As an editor, you should notice the rhythms from good
actors. Utilize and stretch them to fit the pace of the entire film.

In a conversation, there are moments where you feel you can’t look away, and others where you
must to process the information. Every shot has these fixed “cut points” where it feels right to
cut, which gives that moment a different meaning and effects the audience’s mindset from there
on out. Like the branches of a tree, you choose which of these cuts is right and it leads you
down a different path, affecting the next, then the next. Where you feel comfortable blinking - if
you are really listening - is where the cut will feel right.
1) identify a series of potential cut points (and comparisons with the blink can help you do
this)
2) determine what effect each cut point will have on the audience
3) choose which of those effects is the correct one for the film

Your job is partly to anticipate, partly to control the thought processes of the audience. To give
them what they want and/or what they need just before they have to “ask” for it - to be surprising
yet self-evident at the same time. Too far ahead of behind and you create problems. If you are
right with them, leading them ever so slightly, the flow of events feels natural and exciting at the
same time.

In an actual fight, you will blink dozens of times a minute because you are thinking dozens of
conflicting thoughts a minute, so to have the audience participate emotionally in the fight, there
should be dozens of cuts per minute. On the other hand, if you wanted to create an objective
distance - to have the audience observe the fight as a phenomenon in itself - then you would
reduce the number of cuts considerably.

A Galaxy of Winking Dots

Imagine shining an infrared light into audience’s eyes and observing their blinks while watching
a film. If the film is working they will blink in unison. If the blinks are scattered, then it isn’t
working. There is a famous live recording of pianist Sviatoslav Richter playing Mussorgsky’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.

If someone isn’t being honest in their own character, such as a politician may be, their blinking
rhythm is off and we intuitively, subconsciously can tell and feel that something’s off and dislike
that person.

Final paragraph:
“That brings me back to 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. Without their knowing why, a poorly
edited film will cause the audience to hold back, unconsciously saying to themselves, “There’s
something scattered and nervous about the way the film is thinking, the way it presents itself. I
don’t want to think that way; therefore, I’m not going to give as much of myself to the film as I
might.” Whereas a good film that is well-edited seems like an exciting extension and elaboration
of the audience’s own feelings and thoughts, and they will therefore give themselves to it, as it
gives itself to them.”