Walter Murch's: In the blink of an eye

Walter Murch's, In a blink of an eye, discusses his perspective on editing. Murch explains an order that he finds take precedence when editing during his long-spanning distinguished 50 year old career, “The ideal cut is one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once.” Yet continues, that these six elements used to build the story within the edit, are prioritised:

“What I’m suggesting is a list of priorities. If you have to give up something, don’t ever give up emo­tion before story. Don’t give up story before rhythm, don’t give up rhythm before eye-trace, don’t give up eye-trace before planarity, and don’t give up planarity before spatial continuity.”

As Murch explains it in his book:

''(The cut) represents a total and instantaneous displacement of one field of vision with another, a displacement that sometimes also entails a jump forward or backward in time as well as space. It works but it easily could have been otherwise, since nothing in our day-to-day experience seems to prepare us for such a thing.''

In reference to cutting, Murch conveys that it should work: “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 the moment you decide to cut, what you are saying is, in effect, ‘I am going to bring this idea to an end and start something new.’”

Murch believes that though he uses his intuition in order to place his cuts from the way he reads each scene, which he says himself he likes to pretend the material is a silent film when editing so that the scene can be read even without dialogue. However he watches the same scene repetitives making cuts in real time in soughting to create the same cut he feels if the subsequent cut lands on two differing frames then he hasnt figured the rhythm of the scene correctly. The rhythm he suggests almost always matches the way and timing people blink. 

 

“Statistically the two rates — of real-life blinking and of film cutting — are close enough for comparison,” Murch states. “A convincing action sequence might have around twenty-five cuts a minute, whereas a dialogue scene would still feel ‘normal’ (in an American film) averaging six cuts per minute.”