Saturday, September 19, 2009

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.