In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch

Walter Murch’s insight on editing and cinema is pretty genius. This book definitely has re-readability and what you take from it can change depending on where you are in your understanding of cinema production. I’m going to write down the few things leapt out at me at this stage in my life as film student.

We are all looking for internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world. Some people—like Stravinsky—have a volcano inside them and compensate by urging restraint. Others have a glacier and compensate by urging passionate abandon. The danger is a glacial person reading Stravinsky and further restraining. --> This book is an insight into Murch’s search for balance.

“It is frequently at the edges of things that we learn the most about the middle: ice and steam can reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could.” pg. 1 Understanding what is “normal” may best be got at by understanding what is not normal.

“Always try to do the most with the least—with an 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 onscreen. Why? Because you want to engage the imagination of the audience—suggestion is always more effective than exposition.” pg 15. You want your audience to participate in what is going on, be actively engaged. Not passive bored spectators.

Murch, when editing linearly, would take representative stills from each scene and place them side by side. They weren’t meant to go together but it would give him ideas. These stills acted like “hieroglyphs for the language of emotions.” pg. 41.

When an audience reacts to a scene that they didn’t like, they impulse is to fix the scene or cut it, but that may not be the problem at all. “Instead, the problem may be that the audience didn’t understand something that they needed to know for the scene to work. So, instead of fixing the scene itself, you may have to clarify some exposition that happens five minutes earlier.” pg 55. He compares this to having shoulder pain in the elbow that is caused by a pinched nerve in the shoulder. If you operate on the elbow you make the pain worse, when the source of the referred pain is much higher up the arm. The audience will never tell you that directly, they will just tell you the source of the pain, the elbow, you have to figure out where it is coming from. Great advice that comes back to the director. The director always needs to know what each scene is about. Why is this in the movie? That will be a key to understanding if the scene is serving that purpose or if we need more information for it to work. I’ve got to tear apart every script I do so I can see each scene on this level.

The core of Murch’s book comes from the title. He believes film is as close to real thought as art can get right now. He noticed while editing The Conversation that Gene Hackman was always blinking very close to where he decided to cut. This caused him to re-examine how we use blinking in our daily lives. It is not as scientific as moisture for the eye balls or it would be predictable. Instead we use blinking as our own means of editing. We break our surroundings up into smaller pieces and juxtapose them together, using the blink to excise out unnecessary information, in order to better make comparisons. We also use it to separate thoughts, sort thing out mentally. Our rate of blinking is determined by our emotional state and the nature and frequency of our thoughts. Murch goes further to say that the blink seems to happen in the listener precisely when they get the idea of what you are saying, when the understand where you are going with your thought. And this is where the cut could have been in cinema.

“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 a film—a shot presents us with an idea, or sequence of ideas, and the cut is a “blink” that separates and punctuates those ideas. At the moment you decide to cut, what you are saying is, in effect, “I am going to bring this idea to a close and start something new.” It is important to emphasize that the cut, by itself does not crete 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 the punctuation will be. 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. And, in fact, I would go so far to as to say that these juxtapositions are not accidental mental artifacts but part of the method we use to make sense of the world: We must render visual reality discontinuous, otherwise perceived reality would resemble an almost incomprehensible sting of letters without word separation or punctuation. When we sit in a dark theater, then we find edited film a (surprisingly) familiar experience.” pg. 63
--> this is interesting, our body functions unconsciously help us understand the world as the brain understands it. Our written language, with its words and punctuation reflects this need for separation our brain requires as well. Is there something about our brains physical make up that requires separation? Would an alien brain also require this type of punctuation? Could studying abnormal brains be insightful to this understanding? Maybe it is just the way life is structured, everything is built from smaller and smaller bits.

“You should be right with the blinks, perhaps leading them ever so slightly. I certainly don’t expect the audience to blink at every cut—the cut point should be a potential blink. In a sense, by cutting, by this sudden displacement of the visual field, you are blinking for the audience: You achieve the immediate juxtaposition of two concepts for them—what they achieve in the real world by blinking...Your job is partly to anticipate, partly to control the thought process 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. If you are too far behind or ahead of them, you create problems, but if you are right with them, leading them ever so slightly, the flow of events feels natural and exciting at the—same time.” pg 69.

Oscar Wilde: “When God wants to punish somebody, he gives them what they want.” The immediacy of digital editing may not be a good thing.

Film is the dramatic construction of watching people think.Yeah they act and do things, but this only matters if we understand their decisions, their thought process or motivation for the actions.

The ending of the book is a brilliant comparative analysis of the history of painting frescoes to oil painting with film to digital cinema. Painting became less and lees collaborative with new technology as is cinema with digital. Is a one man show, with films being directly downloaded from a persons brain necessarily better or healthy? Look at how tortured Van Gogh was? “The paradox of cinema is that it seems to be most effective when it seems to fuse two contradictory elements—the general and the personal—into a kind of mass intimacy.” pg 143. Collaboration often serves this goal. My experiences plus Dustin’s experiences in this new script will hopefully come together to reach a wider audience than just my ideas alone would.

"A Woman's Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Consumerism, and Feminism" Leslie W. Rabine - 1994

Rabine's article is the closest to the writings of the 2nd wave feminists we read last week. She traces a shift in psychology with the actual physicality of the magazines and the shifts in their articles and how this is reflected in culture. Rabine argues that the blurring of boundaries between realistic and fantastic are contained in one flip through Vogue. Now we have learned a fluidity of subjectivity so that we can move through both bodies. Unlike last week's readings where the magazine image is something we imitate that is helping us to participate in our oppression. Rabine is close to Bordo, always returning us to material conditions.

Rabine looks at the contradictions of fashion and women's identity presented in Vogue and other fashion magazines, primarily in how the editorials are juxtaposed to the advertisements. She traces these representations historically. "Fashion does not merely express this self [women's self expression], but, as a powerful symbolic system, is a major force in producing it. Women of fashion become "speaking" subjects of a symbolic system which inseparably entangles signs of oppression and liberation within the images of the fashion feminine body." (p.60) So women abandon heavy, encumbering garments, symbolically freeing themselves from men, but the new clothes are more revealing, making them more likely to be sex objects to men. in one issue of Vogue, 2 separate articles , one talking about a secure, self-reflexive modern woman is placed next to one about domestic violence. "The 'secure,' 'free' woman and the victim of domestic violence are the same 'modern woman.'" (p.62) Then she relates the woman rape victim whose rapist was acquitted because she dressed to sexy, when an article in Vogue is telling her that it is okay to dress sexy and be empowered by your clothes. The jurors "projected upon the rapist the authority to decide the single correct reading of the woman's clothing and to determine the true addressee as himself." (p.62) This happened in 1989. SHIT.

The reader of the magazine is presumed to have a desire for identity, that can be found within the pages of the magazine through "heightened self-reflexivity, a more blatant sexy look, and the voice of progressive social movements." "The contradictory symbolic system of fashion works according to a logical figure that modifies two common views of postmodern cultural logic as either the recuperation and containment of resistance within hegemonic culture or as the indeterminate oscillation between two terms. In the logic of fashion, it is not resistance that is contained, but the conflict itself between freedom and dominance." (p.63) There is a shift in magazines from the 60s to the 80s from telling readers what to wear to offering them a choice of looks. Again there is a relation to fantasy and self production and this shift "represents a shift from assuming a reader who uncritically imitates an established social role to assuming a reader who produces a self through a proliferation of theatrical roles created through a judicious use of costume and masquerade." (p.64)

There is a double language in the magazines, one "in which a woman is free to make her body into an image of feminine sexual power but not to walk her body down the street." (p.67)

--> All of the readings are trying to get at contradictions. Give us different lenses to understand points of contradiction. No one gives an answer. Feminism and cultural studies become institutionalized in this moment. Unpacking contradictions and navigate the production/consumption divide, not fixate it as a divide, but as a place of practice, not a monolith. New exploration of methodology with an engagement of cultural studies is often tied to political activism. Analyzing how power operates as complex, not a monolithic site of oppression (patriarchy is not the one enemy) “personal is political” dovetails with cultural studies creating a feedback loop between feminism and cultural studies.

"Women Recovering Our Clothes" Iris Marion Young - 1990

Young is not quite as optimistic as Berry, but up there. Sharing of clothes and sharing of identity, clothes are often very personal sites of identity expression. She also examines Touch as an under-examined site of feminism. Psychoanalysis fetish with vision and ignores the tactile (and other senses).

Women’s experience of clothing is “saturated with the experience of images of women in clothing” and images have only recently become widely accessible through mass print to middle/lower class.

The dominant pictorial aesthetic is in part represented in film. Associating style and fashions with a cinematic narrative “fuses the unconscious effects of film experience with the very lines and colors of clothing designs.” (p.200)

Young cites Lacan and Mulvey saying “in film both voyeuristic and fetishistic looking deny the threatening difference of the female, either judging her lacking and guilty or turning her body or parts of her body into an icon in which the subject finds himself, his phallus.” (p.201) Yet she is concerned with how women, in the face of this objectification, can still find pleasure in films (and fashion). “When I leaf through magazines and catalogs I take my pleasure from imagining myself perfected and beautiful and sexual for the absent or mirrored male gaze.” (p.202)

“Patriarchal fashion folds create a meticulous paradigm of the woman well dressed for the male gaze, then endows with guilt the pleasure we might derive for ourselves in these clothes. Misogynist mythology gloats in its portrayal of women as frivolous body decorators.” (p.203) Her methodology is to talk from personal experience and hope it resonates with some women (most likely those most similar to her, white, middle class, heterosexual women in late capitalist society) about clothes in relation to Touch, Bonding and Fantasy.

Touch - If masculine desire expresses itself visually (and at a distance) then feminine desire moves more through the intimate medium of touch. Sensual, tactile imaginations and connection to clothes not just visually but through all sensations.

Bonding - Women develop a rapport and bonding over clothes. Exchanging clothes is like exchanging parts of our identities.

Fantasy - “Implicitly feminist critics of media images of women have tended to assimilate all images of women as the object of the male gaze. Clothing ads are split, however, between positioning women as object and women as subject. Clothing images are not always the authoritative mirror that tells who’s the fairest of them all, but the entrance to a wonderland of characters and situations.” (p.207) Women tend to create narratives out of what is implied in the ad and then derive pleasure “in the fantasy of clothes” by “partly imagining ourselves in those possible stories.” (p.208)

"Screen Style: Introduction" Sarah Berry - 2000

Berry is the furthest away from 2nd Wave Feminists of last week. She is involved much more in the celebratory, agency and pleasure aspect of feminist theory. This is easier if you zoom into a micro view like she does with her case study of 1930s fashion. Berry and Young are both relatively optimistic. Berry is complicating the side of production. Men in Hollywood are largely immigrants and their own upward mobility and relation to power is very complex. 1930s are a moment when women are entering the service industries more. Subjective feeling of emancipation often doesn’t take you very far. Rabine and Berry are at odds. Berry’s tone is sometimes refreshing, sometimes optimistic, empiricist and historical, but possibly not as much as it should be. (Refer to Patty's post, I think she has problems with Berry's argument.)

"[Hollywood-Style Center of the World (1939)] represents mass-market fashion as a democratic leveling of social distinctions" where the film acts a shop window of the latest fashions to small town, rural America. (p.xii) Industrial revolution and catalogs, department chain stores allowed for wealthy women's Paris fashion trends to be adopted by lower class much faster. Looking at popular fashion in the 1930s "as an aspect of women's negotiation of modernity and post-traditional identity (the shift from hereditary caste systems to capitalist social divisions)." (p.xiii) Also marks a time when shift (according to Marxists) from people being identified by what the consume vs. what they produce, but women have always been identified with symbolic forms of beauty more so than their domestic labor, which was never given as much significance as men's labor so the impact of this shift on women's identities is more complex.

Women are seen as primary consumers and targets of Hollywood films. Social status was presented in these films as a matter of appearance, not breeding, and could therefore be imitated. Fashion was the way to be upwardly mobile as the "self-made men" of Hollywood's studios were. "Popular fashion discourses of this decade emphasized the demystification of upper-class glamor in ways that underscored the economic basis, rather than the inherent social superiority, of upper class culture." (p.xix) Reflecting the American ideal of meritocracy vs. aristocracy. Chapter 2 talks about fashion related to Stars, performance and gender. Chapter 3 is about make-up and Chapter 4 is about women adopting men's fashion for upward mobility.

"Femininity" Susan Brownmiller - 1984

Brownmiller has her own painstaking way of dismissing and embracing some aspects of femininity and not others. She carefully works out her anxieties in the text of her book and has a simplistic tone.

Prologue
"Femininity, in essence, is a romantic sentiment, a nostalgic tradition of imposed limitations...To be insufficiently feminine is viewed as a failure in core sexual identity." (p. 2-3) It also is bred of competition with others and with self. Brownmiller is attempting to link femininity to female biology, sometimes she finds connections and sometimes she doesn't. Often times the origins of femininity lie in the "historic subjugation of women through sexual violence, religion and law, where certain myths about women where put forth as biological fact. (p.5) goal of the book is to raise awareness of femininity so "one day the feminine ideal will no longer be used to perpetuate inequality between the sexes..." (p.6)

Body
Current erotic standards change over time and across cultures, but their is usually one model to which all must strive for. Women should be shorter than men, but in the majority of species, females happen to be the larger species. Chinese foot binding and the "exquisite feminine beauty contained within the deforming violence..." (p.17) "The truth is, men have barely tampered with their bodies at all, historically, to make themselves more appealing to women." (p.19) The corset fits the beauty is pain mantra and signifies the "submissive, self-conscious values of the feminine sphere." (p.21) She talks endlessly about breasts and how their containment throughout history has been viewed. She ends talking about dieting and how it is a competition between women that takes the form of denial of food.

Clothes
She is very bitter about skirts and talks about throughout history how women have been bound and restricted by skirts. She talks very personally about her refusal to wear skirts now that she can get away with wearing pants. She talks about historical women like Joan of Ark and Marlene Dietrich that have dressed in men's clothes and the historical implications of such. "Erotic attire has often served as a smoke screen to deflect the female consciousness from a lasting understanding of the nature of oppression." (p.69) Dolls train women to be fashion consumers.

Skin
Skin condition is related to cleanliness, hygiene and age. Youthful, smooth and pale is the usual type societies aspire to. 'Sunburnt' and 'red-neck' are a symbol of the working class, performing manual labor under the sun. In the 60s the California tan came in, but went out when skin studies said nothing ages Caucasian skin more than sun. She talks about biological differences between the sexes don't affect skin color or distribution of hair. Gendered biology does affect amount and degree of hair between men and women though and women should want to remove or contain their hair as much as possible. Again her personal stories make her biased against shaving, using perfume and even make-up. " This is the central contradiction of make-up, and the one I find most appalling. Cosmetics have been seen historically as proof of feminine vanity, yet they are proof, if anything, of feminine insecurity..." (p.123) The artifice of cosmetics has been historically seen as luxury and to "tell people not to do something that makes them feel better is always suspect, and to suggest that women throw away their mascara and file down their nails in the name of liberation cast the femininst movement in a repressive light." (p.124)

"Femininity and Domination, chapters 3+5" Sandra Lee Bartky - 1990

Bordo and Bartky (feminist philosophers) are more nuanced as not everything is painful, there can be pleasure and agency. They situate their critiques within a history of ideas, Foucault etc.

Bartky has very Utopian idea of what women should be but can’t really locate it. She comes up with a revolutionary aesthetic of the body, a radical body - 6 years later she flushes out nuances of conflicting aspects of feminism, but the radical body becomes more like the natural 70s body, which many of us don’t feel more powerful in. (For example, Tara feels more comfortable in her constructed, performative body that her natural one.) Bartky and Doane both deal with female narcissism.

Chapter 3: Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation
"One of the tasks that socialist feminists have yet to accomplish is the alteration and elaboration of Marx's theory of alienation." (p.33) "For Marx, labor is the most distinctively human activity; following Hegel, he regards the product of labor as an exteriorization of the worker's being, an objectification of human powers and abilities. But under capitalism, workers are alienated form the products of their labor as well as from their own productive activity." (p.34) Summing up Marx as arguing that separating workers from the product of their labor causes fragmentation and prohibition of the exercise of typically human functions which causes workers to be like condemned prisoners. (Men are still responding to this in escapist movies like Wanted, and superhero movies in general as looking for the means to escape the new incarnation of Marx's capitalist society in which everyone works in tiny, divided cubicals at a computer all day creating virtual "products.")

Bartky extends Marx's definition of alienation to women. Women are alienated in cultural production (men have control) and sexual objectification of women (as passive subjects meant to be looked at) fragments women. The difference between Marx's alienation of labor and femininity as alienation is that "many women seem to embrace with enthusiasm what seem to be the most alienated aspects of feminine existence." (p.36) if objectifier and objectified become the same woman we get feminine narcissism. "How is feminine narcissism possible, i.e., how is it possible for sexual objectification, which is profoundly alienating, to produce narcissistic states of consciousness, which are profoundly satisfying? We can understand the interest women have in conforming to the requirements of sexual objectification, given our powerlessness and dependency; less easy to explain is the pleasure we take in doing so." (p.37) She uses narcissism by its original definition in psychoanalysis (infatuation with one's bodily being). She wants to argue that "feminine narcissism is not the rock on which the idea of femininity as alienation must founder. On the contrary, a fuller disclosure of this phenomenon can help reveal the nature of self-estrangement which lies close to the heart of the feminine condition itself." (p.37)

"Knowing that she is to be subjected to the cold appraisal of the male connoisseur and that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first. The sexual objectification of women produces a duality in the feminine consciousness. The gaze of the Other is internalized so that I myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised." (p.38) The "Other" can take on many forms (mother, self, lover) but becomes "an interiorized representative of what I shall call the "fashion-beauty complex"...a major articulation of capitalist patriarchy." (p.39) This is the same idea that all the articles articulate: keep the standards of beauty so high that women are constantly found lacking and need to make up for their lack by purchasing goods to better themselves. "All the projections of the fashion-beauty complex have this in common: They are images of what I am not...We can now grasp the nature of feminine narcissism with more precision: it is infatuation with an inferiorized body." (p.40) Like the church, that creates anxieties about bodily appetites and then presents itself as the only way "to take away the very guilt and shame it has itself produced" the fashion-beauty complex creates anxiety and lack that only it can fulfill through body care rituals and products. These are "false needs" that are "produced through indoctrination, psychological manipulation, and the denial of autonomy; they are needs whose possession and satisfaction benefit not the subject who has them, but the social order whose interest lies in domination." (p.42) They are repressive satisfactions. Her solution is that women must work together to expand the notion of what is beautiful. The problem seems to present itself as a catch 22, how can we have pride in our body and have self-esteem while denying the dominant idea of beauty that usually lends itself to self-esteem and positive self-image?

Foucault, Femininty, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power
Panopticon - the perfect prison where, under constant surveillance, each inmate becomes his own jailer, internalizes self-surveillance which is the genesis of "the celebrated 'individualism' and heightened self-consciousness which are hallmarks of modern times." (p.65) Femininity is an artifice and Bartky examines 3 things that are recognizably feminine: (1) sculpting the physical body, (2) movement and gestures and (3) display of the body as an ornamented surface. All these three things are based on women being deficient, passive and highly constructed. "Femininity as spectacle is something which virtually every woman is required to participate. Second, the precise nature of the criteria by which women are judged, not only the inescapability of the judgment itself, reflects gross imbalances in the social power of the sexes that do not mark the relationship of artist and their audiences. An aesthetic of femininity, for example, that mandates fragility and a lack of muscular strength produces female bodies that can offer little resistance to physical abuse..." (p.73) "The absence of formal institutional structure and of the authorities invested with power the power to carry out institutional directives creates the impression that the production of femininity is either entirely voluntary or natural." (p.75) This is different from Foucault's ideas about discipline of the body being tied to social institutions like the school, the factory or the prison. Now the media and visual representations are taking over these roles to create internalized self-critique; isolated and self-policing subjects. Images in the media create a normative image of femininity. She doesn't really present a solution to the problem. She suggests a better understanding of cultural messages.

"The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of the Cinema" Mary Ann Doane - 1989

Feminist theory situates women as the "object of exchange rather than its subject" making her the commodity. But women also buy and has been situated by capitalist economy as "the prototype modern consumer." (p.23) Have to rethink the absoluteness of dichotomy of object of commodity and consumer to include ways that " a woman is encouraged to actively participate in her own oppression. (p.24) She compares the "passive spectator" in cinema to the "passive consumer" seduced by the beauty of ads to mindlessly consume.

The 3 "instances of commodity form in its relation to the cinema and the question of the female spectator-consumer:
1.Narcissism - "The female spectator is invited to witness her own commodification and, furthermore, to buy an image of herself insofar as the female star is proposed as the ideal feminine beauty. (p.25)
2. Product placement - "This process serves to mediate the spectator's access to the ideal image on the screen. It disperses the fascination of the cinema onto a multiplicity of products whose function is to allow the spectator to approximate the image." (p.25)
3. Distribution - "the film itself and its status as commodity in a circuit of exchange." (p.25)

The movie theater was the ideal space to exhibit the ideal image of consumerism: "an homogeneous population pursuing the same goals - 'living well' and accumulating goods." (p.25)

"If the film frame is a kind of display window and spectatorship consequently a form of window-shopping, the intimate association of looking and buying does indeed suggest that the prototype of the spectator-consumer is female." (p.27) - making cinema addressed specifically to the female spectator and a star system dominated by women. Uses Benjamin to argue that film brings the things to be consumed closer to the viewer and also to each other, eliminating distance which is more like narcissism (opposite of voyeurism in which one person watches another from a distance). "Commodification presupposes that acutely self-conscious relation to the body which is attributed to femininity." (p.31) --> Less distance, narcissistic relationship. Fragment body (just as adds fragment TV shows?) so that each part can be improved.

"The cinematic image for the woman is both shop window and mirror, the one simply the means of access to the other. The mirror/window, then, takes on aspect of a trap whereby her subjectivity becomes synonymous with her objectification." (p.32)

Stella Dallas – A touchstone for popular texts as a feminist in the 90s. Stella is self-sacrificing for motherhood. Works nicely with Doane’s text, which is linked to Bartky in understanding narcissism. Doane’s piece is situated in cinema. How we come to see ourselves. Increasingly less and less distance between consumer and consumed. (Is this true or false when the consumed is virtual on the internet? How is virtual space articulated?)