In The Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch, Silman-James Press, 2001 (Second Edition)

Legendary editor's philosophical meditation on film editing, transcribed from his 1988 lecture to the Australian Film Commission. Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Part II, The English Patient—first editor to win Oscar for digitally-edited film) explores why cuts work psychologically despite representing instantaneous displacement unnatural to human experience. Francis Coppola's foreword describes Murch as "philosopher and theoretician of film—a gifted director," noting "nothing so fascinating as spending hours listening to Walter's theories."

Apocalypse Now Statistics. Film demonstrates editing realities through extreme example: 1,250,000 feet printed (230 hours), finished film runs two hours twenty-five minutes—ratio ninety-five to one versus industry average twenty to one. Colonel Kilgore's helicopter sequences alone: 220,000 feet for twenty-five minutes, finished product—ratio one hundred to one. Eight cameras turning simultaneously, thousand-foot rolls (eleven minutes each), each takes generating 8,000 feet (an hour and a half). Editors worked to produce 1.47 cuts per day—had they known the exact path at the beginning, they could have made one-and-a-half splices daily and arrived at the same destination. For every splice in the finished film, probably fifteen "shadow" splices were made, considered, and undone. The remaining eleven hours fifty-eight minutes daily were spent on screenings, discussions, rewinding, meetings, scheduling, filing trims, note-taking, and deliberative thought.

Why Cuts Work. Film runs at twenty-four times per second—each frame displaces the previous one. The displacement is small enough (twenty milliseconds) for audiences to perceive motion within context rather than twenty-four different contexts per second. When visual displacement is great enough (at the cut), we must re-evaluate the new image as a different context—miraculously, we do this without difficulty. We struggle with displacements neither subtle nor total: cutting from a full-figure master to a slightly tighter shot (framing actors from ankles up) signals something changed, but not different enough to require re-evaluation. This collision produces mental jarring. The discovery that certain cuts worked led immediately to the discovery that films could be shot discontinuously—the cinematic equivalent of discovering flight. Discontinuity became King during production; almost all decisions relate to overcoming its difficulties or exploiting its strengths.

Rule of Six Hierarchy. Murch places three-dimensional continuity (film school's first topic) at the bottom of six criteria for good cuts. Top priority: Emotion—how you want the audience to feel. The ideal cut satisfies all six simultaneously: true to the emotion of the moment, advances the story, occurs at a rhythmically interesting moment, acknowledges eye-trace (location and movement of audience focus within frame), respects planarity (grammar of three dimensions transposed to two), and respects three-dimensional space continuity. Film schools emphasise the bottom priority because emotion is hardest to define and manage. What the audience finally remembers is not editing, camerawork, performances, or even story—it is how they felt.

Editing as Discovery. Editing is not assembly but the discovery of a path. The overwhelming majority of an editor's time is not spent splicing film. Wife Aggie's childhood friend asked what Murch did. He replied, "Studying film editing." Friend: "That's where you cut out the bad bits." Murch protested, explaining structure, colour, dynamics, and time manipulation. Twenty-five years later, he respects that unwitting wisdom. Editing is cutting out the bad bits. The tough question: what makes a bit bad? What is bad in one film may be good in another. Filmmaking is the search to identify what, for your particular film, is uniquely a bad bit.

DNA/Chimpanzee Analogy. Human and chimpanzee DNA are ninety-nine per cent identical, yet obvious differences exist. Differences arise from sequencing that controls the order and rate of DNA information activation as the organism grows. Information in DNA resembles uncut film; the mysterious sequencing code resembles an editor. Two editors given identical footage make different films through different structural choices—when and in what order to release pieces of information. Humans and chimps are like different films edited from the same dailies. Don't start making a chimpanzee, then decide to turn it into a human. That produces the Frankenstein's monster equivalent in theatres.

Most with Least. Never judge a sound mix by counting tracks—terrible mixes emerge from a hundred tracks, wonderful mixes from three. Always attempt the most with the least—produce the greatest effect in the viewer's mind with the least number of things on screen. Suggestion beats exposition. Past a certain point, more effort into detail encourages the audience to become spectators rather than participants. The overactive editor who changes shots too frequently resembles a tour guide who cannot stop pointing things out. People eventually feel constrained and resentful from the constant pressure.