Fascinating to read if you want to know the history of the transition from analogue to digital film editing (I'm reading the 2nd edition in which Murch reflects a lot on digital editing). Though most editing technology discussed here is pretty dated, but as a media archaeology it really gives insight into how the editing technology has evolved. On a theoretical basis, I don't entirely agree with the 'blinking' theory, however, I can see that this theory has a solid foundation in Hollywood-type filmmaking especially that relates to cutting, blinking, and the way the character in the film thinks. There is also a fascinating reflection on digital editing and how it relates to the pacing of modern Hollywood filmmaking, in which it seems faster in terms of cutting and montage (somehow on some level reminds me of Stork's Chaos Cinema). The question then arises, does digital editing (considering its random-access mechanism) also impact the way people shoot and construct film?

Makes you rethink the whole concept of video editing. Great read.

Fascinating stuff, especially in a time of cinematic upheaval. The second half speculating about the then-oncoming digital revolution is compellingly prescient. It’s abstract and free-wheeling a lot of the time, but Murch writes about the intangible appeal of the movies really, really well. I’d be curious to hear what he has to say about the increasing shift to streaming and at-home viewing in the past year.

Love love love this!! I would be interested in reading a 3rd edition to see what Murch thinks of the technological advances today. A lottttt has changed

- “Don’t start making a chimpanzee and then decide to turn it into a human being instead. That produces a stitched-together Frankenstein’s monster, and we’ve all seen its equivalent in the theaters…” (p. 13)
- “If the [editor] doesn’t have the confidence to let people themselves occasionally choose what they want to look at, or to leave things to their imagination, then he is pursuing a goal (complete control) that in the end is self-defeating.” (p. 16)

- “… the director is generally the dreamer and the editor is the listener. But even for the most well-prepared of directors, there are limits to the imagination and memory, particularly at the level of fine detail, and 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.” (p. 27)

- “… 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.” (p. 62)
- “Coherent blinking would be a strong indicator that the audience was thinking together, and that the film was working.” (p. 71)
- “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.” (p. 72)

- “With a theatrical film,… the screen is… a magic window, sort of a looking glass through which your whole body passes and becomes engaged in the action with the characters on the screen.” (p. 122)
- “… the true cinematic experience can’t be had in the home, no matter how technically advanced the equipment becomes.” (p. 144)
- “… cinema will be with us a hundred years from now. Different of course, but still cinema. Its persistence will be fueled by the unchanging human need for stories in the dark, and its evolution will be sparked by the technical revolutions now getting underway.” (p. 146)

Finished the book on Feb 14th but didn’t have time to write the review until today oops

Murch has taken years of experience in the film industry and poured them into this work of theory and art. Deep enough for those well-versed in film arts yet still appealing to those outside that world. Well written and thoroughly engaging.

Yes, a book on film editing, it's about storytelling.

If you're interested though, I'd recommend The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje. It contains much the same (and more) content and is crafted by Ondaatje to emphasize not just Murch's genius, but also his humility and eager, genuine curiosity. And it's about storytelling.

p. 15

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.

p. 55

So, instead of fixing the scene itself, you might clarify some exposition that happens five minutes earlier. Don’t necessarily operate on the elbow: instead, discover if nerves are being pinched somewhere else. But the audience will never tell you that directly. They will simply tell you where the pain is, not the source of the pain.

p. 62-63

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... At any rate, I believe "filmic" juxtapositions are taking place in the real world not only when we dream but also when we are awake.

Um bom livro de edição e de cinema. Murch tem umas sacadas que eu jamais pensaria, mas que me fizeram refletir bastante sobre a arte da edição; acho que vale apena ler para entender como a edição era feita, como fazemos hoje e como será feita no futuro. É bem curtinho, lê-se rápido. :)

In the Blink of an Eye first came out about the time I was teaching myself to shoot and edit video, and I was looking for all kinds of books to help me along with that education. I remember looking at the book in my local bookstore and passing on it because it seemed less instructional than theoretical. Now, 20 years on in my profession, and well past the instructional stuff, someone on one of my social media groups quoted from the book, and it piqued my interest. So I got myself a copy.

My first instincts about the book were correct: this is about the theory of editing: what a cut is, what it does, how it works, why it works. I have the 2nd edition, which came out in 2001, revised to include an updated section on the movement of cinema from film to digital media. When the book was first published in 1995, that transition had only just begun. In 2001, it was much more underway, though still far from where we are now in 2021. The first part of book, mostly unchanged from the original printing, is 70-some pages adapted from a lecture series Walter Murch had given on film. The last part of the book is called an afterward, but it is about equal in length to the first part. The afterward looks at the move from film to digital media, looking at advantages and drawbacks, and detailing Murch’s own personal experience with the shift, a shift he had eagerly anticipated and partook in. From 2021, it is impressive how accurate his analysis and predictions were.

Murch is the exact kind of professional I love to read. He’s not only terribly knowledgeable about his subject and field, but he’s an excellent writer and he engages with the art at an intellectual and spiritual level. As someone who edits videos, even of a much lower caliber than the material Murch works on, I found myself nodding along in recognition of what he revealed. His handling of the topic is simultaneously familiar and original, and always it is full of insight. The work managed to give me a new appreciation for what we do, and that is a gift from Murch to all of us. What Ansel Adams did for me in terms of photography, what Vincent Baker did for me in terms of game design, what Barry Hampe did for me in approaching documentary work, and what Robert McKee did for me in thinking about western stories, Walter Murch has done for m in film and editing.

I’m glad I didn’t read the book at the start of my journey. While I may have gotten a few glimpses of insight, I would have been asking the book to be something other than it is rather than hearing what it has to say.

While this is more geared towards the editing concerns for larger productions with multi-month editing cycle, Murch has many insights into the basic practicalities of editing. Even better are the bits where he delves further, into the theoretical underpinnings of what a cut is, and why they work at all given the unfamiliarity of jump cuts in day to day life (so one would think). Still, it's converted pretty directly from a lecture he delivered, which keeps the material a little close to the surface for my liking -- I should really keep reading this Peter Wollen film theory book I found at the Strand for the denser, deeper conceptual stuff, or more Ruiz perhaps. And, over half the length of the book is an Afterword, added in 2001, concerning the new advances in digital editing, of course now 13 years out of date, ie essentially a lifetime. Still, Murch is a great editor, and this forms a brisk overview of the subject.

Written by one of the great editors of one of the U.S.’s finest decades of cinema, the 1970s, Walter Murch is part psychologist philosopher and part editor in this short treatise on film editing. Written before the digital age, it talks to students about the aesthetics and psychology of editing, rather than which key on your keyboard to press, which seems to dominate so much of the education surrounding editing today, with the technology overtaking the storytelling aspect. As a teacher myself overwhelmed with the ever changing technology, I sometimes get so involved in explaining the technical aspects of Final Cut Pro that I don’t spend enough time with the real question of editing “Where do you make a cut—or do you even need to make a cut?” And how do you take 40 hours of film and distill it into 120 mind-blowing, compelling minute? How does an editor jump forward and backward in time and space to best tell a story? At its most simplest, Murch says it is with the blink of an eye. When the audience is ready to blink, it’s time for the editor to cut. But cut to what? There are nearly infinite possibilities to combine a series of shots. But he reminds us that the ideal cut should, in descending importance, take in the following: emotion, story, rhythm, eye trace, two dimensional plane of screen, and the three dimensional plane of screen. (The first three are obviously extremely connected). He also talks about the importance of letting go of the filming once we get into the editing room, so that our choices are not determined by how hard certain shots were to get but rather decide based on what shots best serve the story. He recommends working with stills taken from the film to make up the story first. The way the pictures collide together when mounted on the wall may lead to a new way of looking at things. Once you have your fist cut, he recommends looking again at the original footage—things have changed now and maybe there is something in the original footage that could really help you out now, time permitting. Test screenings are good for blind spots, but give the audience time to digest. Ask them to call the next day with any other thoughts they might have—and don’t operate on the elbow if they say that’s where they feel the pain. Examine everything connected to the elbow to see where the real problem is. The only part of the book that is unnecessary is the comparison of digital and film editing equipment, probably out of date even before the printing. However, Francis Ford Coppola is right in saying the Murch is full of “guidance and nourishment.” And at the end, Murch tells us the best thing an editor can remember is that we see films the way we see dreams, in cut up pieces that connect together in some magical way. So perhaps editors should consider themselves dream makers.

Pure gem in the rough.

So, I have this idea, right? Here it goes. The idea is that at the top levels of performance in different fields, people start seeing, saying and doing very similar things. The short version of the why is that we are all operating in the same reality and in order to operate with maximum possible functioning in response to that reality, you must have a fairly clear view of it, which leads people who have nothing to do with one another (top athletes, scientists, film editors, writers, etc) to come to startlingly similar conclusions despite radically different lived experiences. In this book, Walter Murch affirms this idea for me in a way that is wholly unexpected, and yet which resonates richly with me.

This book is nominally about editing film, as practice, as art, as science. However, along the way of explaining what makes for film editing greatness, Murch discusses ideas which can be found in other disciplines and pursuits. Film analogues of such ideas as combinatorial explosion (math, statistics, epistemology), thin-slicing (beh sci, beh econ), and grounded theory (soc) are found relatively early on in the book. I'll include the quotes in this review for verification purposes.

Combinatorial explosion: "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." (He continues on this way a bit, breaking out the math and using the proper factorials to describe a total set of different film states that grows exponentially until it verges on infinity).

Thin-slicing: "I should add that there’s a subtle but profound difference in how film and digital move at high speed. On linear film machines, like the KEM, you achieve ten times normal speed by reducing the amount of time that any one frame is seen by ninety percent. So a frame is on for V240 of a second, not V24 of a second. It’s very fast, but it’s still there—you can still catch a little something from every single frame. But by the nature of their design, digital systems can’t do that. They achieve ten times normal speed at the cost of suppressing ninety percent of the information. So if you ask a digital machine to go ten times faster than normal, it will do so by showing you only one frame out of every ten. It’s like skipping a rock across the surface of a lake. You are not seeing ninety percent of the film—whereas when you watch sprocketed film at high speed on a KEM or Steenbeck, you see everything. I’m always amazed at how perceptive the human eye is, even at those high speeds, at detecting tiny inflections of looks and expression and action."

Grounded Theory: "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."


Murch also introduces some completely novel ideas while reinforcing knowledge I've gathered from other sources. For example, in detailing the differences between traditional hands-on film editing and digital editing, one of the differences Murch discusses is the posture. The traditional editing machines required standing to work and digital stations didn't, and Murch felt that that was an important enough distinction that he moved the components of his digital work station around to emulate the physical arrangement of a traditional editing machine. This resonates fairly strongly with what Austin Kleon is talking about in Steal Like An Artist, in terms of creativity and cognition being fully embodied. Humans must use our hands and our senses to interact with the art we create first, then do the cleaning and digital stuff afterward. Murch also expounds on a link between blinking and thinking which was entirely novel to me. A blink being a psychological segmentation, marking the end of a thought or a thought-chunk and being a tool for marking individual comprehension and group comprehension in an audience. This is similar to Kahneman and Tsversky's work in measuring pupil dilation to tell whether people were still working on a problem. I see a link there that seems well worth exploring for someone in that field.

Murch also had a touch of almost.. spiritual messaging in certain sections. For example the following quote, "A vast amount of preparation, really, to arrive at the innocuously brief moment of decisive action: the cut—the moment of transition from one shot to the next—something that, appropriately enough, should look almost self-evidently simple and effortless, if it is even noticed at all." sounds deceptively like the Futurama quote from the episode Godfellas, "when you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all".

Murch emphasizes order as being incredibly important to outcomes in a way that seems reminiscent of the theory of constraints body of work. Here's the quote for that "In the early stages of fetal development, it is difficult to tell the difference between human and chimp embryos. And yet, as they grow, they reach a point where differences become apparent, and from that point on, the differences become more and more obvious. For instance, the choice of what comes first, the brain or the skull. In human beings, the priority is brain first, skull next, because the emphasis is on maximizing the size of the brain. Any time you look at a newborn human infant you can see that the skull is not yet fully closed around the top of the still-growing brain. With chimpanzees, the priority is reversed: skull first, then brain—probably for reasons that have to do with the harsher environment into which the chimp is born. The command from the chimp’s sequence is, “Fill up this empty space with as much brain as you can.” But there’s only so much brain you can get in there before you can’t fill it up anymore. At any rate, it seems to be more important for a chimp to be born with a hard head than a big brain. There’s a similar interplay between an endless list of things: The thumb and the fingers, skeletal posture, certain bones being fully formed before certain muscular developments, etc." This is a huge idea for how quietly it's slid into a larger point.

This is a good book by someone who has clearly put much deliberation, time, and effort into their craft and into asking bigger questions than is strictly a requirement of their vocation. I recommend this to anyone interesting in people in general. It's a good perspective on what it takes to be the man behind the curtain that everyone in Oz is to disregard.

Second documented read:

Only one thing has changed. I took more notes this time. Here's my favorite quote:

"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 the same token, someone who bore a glacier within him 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."

Divided into two parts, this book is essentially the sharing of a film editor from his career and the history of editing technology from his personal experience. While one can never doubt his credentials to teach (he edited Copolla's Apocalypse Now, in which production probably produced the most footages in film history for an editor to work on...), I am not sure what a reader can learn from this short book apart from a few truisms. The fact that only two editing examples are given photos also doesn't help.

If you want to learn how to appreciate film editing , you will need to find another book.