"In the Blink of an Eye", Walter Murch

Walter Murch is one of the most respected film editors and sound designers, one of New Hollywod's central figures, having worked with Francis Ford Coppola in The Rain People (1969), The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) and George Lucas in THX 1138  (1971) and American Graffiti (1973), in addition to having taken part in the restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil from the notes that he had sent to Universal. His book In the Blink of the Eye is both pertinent to pen and camera artists, to readers and audiences. In it, Murch exposes his philosophy of editing, his set of thoughts on how to find the identity of a film from a series of chaotic excerpts when the screenplay does not provide all the answers, how small details (one shot before another) can change the direction of the scene and, consequently, the audience's response to it. Full of analogies that show what kind of editing problems can arise and what are the editor's dilemmas, besides autobiographical traces from the experiences of working with Coppola or Zimmerman in Julia (1977). Also discussed are the advantages and disadvantages of editing in analog and digital and, more importantly, the science and poetry that is behind the instant of the "cut" and how it is associated to the blinking of an eye.

Excerpts:

"An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'; 4) it acknowledges what you might call 'eye-trace'—the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects 'planarity'—the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the questions of stage-line, etc.); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another).

Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom."

"So it seems to me that our rate of blinking is somehow geared more to our emotional state and to the nature and frequency of our thoughts than to the atmospheric environment we happen to find ourselves in. Even if there is no head movement (as there was in Huston’s example), 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.

And not only is the rate of blinking significant, but so is the actual instant of the blink itself. Start a conversation with somebody and watch when they blink. I believe you will find that your listener will blink at the precise moment he or she 'gets' the idea of what you are saying, not an instant earlier or later. Why would this be? Well, speech is full of unobserved grace notes and elaborations—the conversational equivalents of 'Dear Sir' and 'Yours Sincerely'—and the essence of what we have to say is often sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion. The blink will take place either when the listener realizes our 'introduction' is finished and that now we are going to say something significant, or it will happen when he feels we are 'winding down' and not going to say anything more significant for the moment.

And that blink will occur where a cut could have happened, had the conversation been filmed. Not a frame earlier or later."

Link to the complete book in PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19xagRtHJwafFw0T8uunLKLrvd6xfFWU4/view?usp=sharing