In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing

by Walter Murch

the fact that editing—even on a “normal” film2—is not so much a putting together as it is a discovery of a path, and that the overwhelming majority of an editor’s time is not spent actually splicing film. The more film there is to work with, of course, the greater the number of pathways that can be considered,

the “cut” in American terminology4—actually does seem to work, even though it 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.

What we do seem to have difficulty accepting are the kind of displacements that are neither subtle nor total: Cutting from a full-figure master shot, for instance, to a slightly tighter shot that frames the actors from the ankles up. The new shot in this case is different enough to signal that something has changed, but not different enough to make us re-evaluate its context: The displacement of the image is neither motion nor change of context, and the collision of these two ideas produces a mental jarring—a jump— that is comparatively disturbing.

An overactive editor, who changes shots too frequently, is like a tour guide who can’t stop pointing things out: “And up there we have the Sistine Ceiling, and over here we have the Mona Lisa, and, by the way, look at these floor tiles . . .” If you are on a tour, you do want the guide to point things out for you, of course, but some of the time you just want to walk around and see what you see.

Film is cut for practical reasons and film is cut because cutting—that sudden disruption of reality—can be an effective tool in itself. So, if the goal is as few cuts as possible, when you have to make a cut, what is it that makes it a good one?

For many years, particularly in the early years of sound film, that was the rule. You struggled to preserve continuity of three-dimensional space, and it was seen as a failure of rigor or skill to violate it.9 Jumping people around in space was just not done, except, perhaps, in extreme circumstances—fights or earthquakes—where there was a lot of violent action going on.

list of six criteria for what makes a good cut. At the top of the list is Emotion, the thing you come to last, if at all, at film school largely because it’s the hardest thing to define and deal with. How do you want the audience to feel?

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 51% 2) Story 23% 3) Rhythm 10% 4) Eye-trace 7% 5) Two-dimensional plane of screen 5% 6) Three-dimensional space of action 4%

And, in fact, there is a practical side to this, which is that if the emotion is right and the story is advanced in a unique, interesting way, in the right rhythm, the audience will tend to be unaware of (or unconcerned about) editorial problems with lower-order items like eye-trace, stage-line, spatial continuity, etc.

Now, in practice, you will find that those top three things on the list—emotion, story, rhythm—are extremely tightly connected. The forces that bind them together are like the bonds between the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the atom.

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.

Sometimes, though, you can get caught up in the details and lose track of the overview. When that happens to me, it is usually because I have been looking at the image as the miniature it is in the editing room, rather than seeing it as the mural that it will become when projected in a theater. Something that will quickly restore the correct perspective is to imagine yourself very small, and the screen very large, and pretend that you are watching the finished film in a thousand-seat theater filled with people, and that the film is beyond the possibility of any further changes. If you still like what you see, it is probably okay. If not, you will now most likely have a better idea of how to correct the problem, whatever it is.

The editor, on the other hand, should try to see only what’s on the screen, as the audience will. Only in this way can the images be freed from the context of their creation.

In many ways, the film editor performs the same role for the director as the text editor does for the writer of a book—to encourage certain courses of action, to counsel against others, to discuss whether to include specific material in the finished work or whether new material needs to be added. At the end of the day, though, it is the writer who then goes off and puts the words together.

The relationship between director and editor is somewhat similar in that the director is generally the dreamer and the editor is the listener.

setup (camera position)

In choosing a representative frame, what you’re looking for is an image that distills the essence of the thousands of frames

that make up the shot in question, what Cartier-Bresson—referring to still photography—called the “decisive moment.”

Editing is a kind of surgery—and have you ever seen a surgeon sitting to perform an operation? Editing is also like cooking—and no one sits down at the stove to cook.

Toward the end of the editing process on Julia, Fred Zinnemann observed that he felt the director and the editor, alone with the film for months and months, could only go ninety percent of the way toward the finished film—that what was needed for the last ten percent was “the participation of the audience,” whom he saw as his final collaborators. Not in the sense that he would respond to them blindly, but that he felt their presence was helpful as a corrective, to keep certain obsessions from becoming corrosive and to point out blind spots that may have developed through over-familiarity with the material.

The pain in the shoulder has been “referred” to the elbow. Audience reactions are like that. When you ask the direct question, “What was your least favorite scene?” and eighty percent of the people are in agreement about one scene they do not like, the impulse is to “fix” the scene or cut it out. But the chances are that that scene is fine. Instead, the problem may be that the audience simply didn’t understand something that they needed to know for the scene to work.

“Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts. After the first look, you know that there’s no reason to pan continuously from me to the lamp because you know what’s in between. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the lamp. Cut. Then you behold me.”12

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 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.16 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.” It is important to emphasize that the cut by itself does not create the “blink moment”—the tail does not wag the dog.

To that same end, one of the disciplines I follow is to choose the “out point” of a shot by marking it in real time. If I can’t do this—if I can’t hit that same frame repeatedly at twenty-four frames per second— I know there is something wrong in my approach to the shot, and I adjust my thinking until I find a frame I can hit. I never permit myself to select the “out point” by inching back and forth, comparing one frame with another to get the best match. That method—for me, at any rate—is guaranteed to produce a rhythmic “tone deafness” in the film.

The policy of the show seemed to be to keep every word of dialogue on screen. When someone had finished speaking, there was a brief pause and then a cut to the person, who was now about to talk, and when he in turn finished speaking there was a cut back to the first person who nodded his head or said

something, and then when that person was finished, they cut back again, etc. It extended to single words. “Have you been downtown yet?” Cut. “No.” Cut. “When are you going downtown?” Cut. “Tomorrow.” Cut. “Have you seen your son?” Cut. “No, he didn’t come home last night.” Cut. “What time does he usually come home?” Cut. “Two o’clock.” At the time, when it first came out, this technique created a sensation for its apparently hard-boiled, police-blotter realism. The “Dragnet” system is a simple way to edit, but it is a shallow simplicity that doesn’t reflect the grammar of complex exchanges that go on all the time in even the most ordinary conversations. If you’re observing a dialogue between two people, you will not focus your attention solely on the person who is speaking. Instead, while that person is still talking, you will turn to look at the listener to find out what he thinks of what is being said.

For instance, by cutting away from a certain character before he finishes speaking, I might encourage the audience to think only about the face value of what he said. On the other hand, if I linger on the character after he finishes speaking, I allow the

audience to see, from the expression in his eyes, that he is probably not telling the truth, and they will think differently about him and what he said.

But since it takes a certain amount of time to make that observation, I cannot cut away from the character too early: Either I cut away while he is speaking (branch number one) or I hold until the audience realizes he is lying (branch number two), but I cannot cut in between t...

Where you feel comfortable blinking—if you are really listening to what is being said—is where the cut will feel right. So there are really three problems wrapped up together: 1) identifying a series of potential cut points (and comparisons with the blink can help you do this), 2) determining what effect each cut point will have on the audience, and 3) choosing which of those effects is the correct one for the

film.

The average “real-world” rate of blinking is somewhere between the extremes of four and forty blinks per minute. If you are in an actual fight, you will be blinking dozens of times a minute because you are thinking dozens of conflicting thoughts a minute—and so when you are watching a fight in a film, there should be dozens of cuts per minute.20 In fact, statistically the two rates—of real-life blinking and of film cutting—are close enough for comparison: Depending on how it is staged, 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 or less.

I certainly don’t expect the audience to blink at every cut—the cut point should be a potential blink point. 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, as in Huston’s example.

When we suggest that someone is a bad actor, we are certainly not saying that he is a bad human being; we are just saying that this person is not as fully in the character as he wants us to believe, and he’s nervous about it. You can see this clearly in political campaigns, where there is sometimes a vivid distinction between who somebody is and who they want the voters to believe they are: Something will always be “wrong” with the rate and moment that these people blink.

The real issue with speed, though, is not just how fast you can go, but where are you going so fast ? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.

One hundred eighty years ago, Balzac wrote eighty classic novels in twenty years, using just a quill pen. Who among our word-processing writers today can even

approach such a record?

Consumers of electronic hardware can now purchase devices that were closely guarded professional secrets as little as ten years ago. This has been particularly true in sound: The average car stereo system of the

1990s produced better sound than the most advanced recording studio of the 1950s.

The hard truth, though, is that easier access does not automatically make for better results. The accompanying sense that “anyone can do it” can easily produce a broth spoiled by too many cooks. All of us today are able to walk into an art store and buy inexpensive pigments and supplies that the Renaissance painters would have paid fortunes for. And yet, do any of us paint on their level today?

Detail is an issue particularly relevant to digital editing because the film has to be digitally compressed to get it to fit economically on the hard drive of the computer, and this can significantly reduce the amount of visual information in any frame. As a result, there may be so little detail that the eye can absorb all of it very quickly, leading the careless editor to cut sooner than if he had been looking at the fully detailed film image.

With a small screen, your eye can easily take in everything at once, whereas on a big screen it can only take in sections at a time. You tend to look at a small screen, but into a big screen. If you are looking at an image, taking it all in at once, your tendency will be to cut away to the next shot sooner.

There’s a completely different aesthetic when you’re in a theater: The screen is huge, everything else in the room is dark, there are (hopefully) no distractions, you are there for at least two hours; you can’t stop the film at your convenience. And so, understandably, feature editing has to be paced differently than musicvideo or commercial editing. What can be done to help with this problem of size, the miniature vs. the mural?

First, as with image detail, be aware that the eye takes in a large picture differently, at a different rate, than a small one.

When regulated postal service was finally established in Great Britain and Royal Mail started to be carried on trains for the first time—somewhere around 1840— it unleashed a torrent of letter-writing among those who were able to do so. People routinely dashed off twenty-page letters three times a week to several correspondents simultaneously, not so much because they had anything particularly compelling to say to each other, but simply from the exhilaration of being able to say it—and have

it reliably received across the country in a matter of days, rather than the unreliable weeks that it took in the days of coach and horses.

A tremendous amount of time also used to be spent in shooting special effects—if somebody flew through the air, they were attached to cables. Consequently, the cameraman had to light the scene so that the cables would be as invisible as possible. Now, with digital effects, you make the cables big and brightly colored, because they then become easier to see and digitally remove.

Francis Ford Coppola’s colorful description of his role sums it up: “The director is the ringmaster of a circus that is inventing itself.”

Film is a dramatic construction in which, for the first time in history, characters can be seen to think at even the subtlest level, and these thoughts can then be choreographed. Sometimes these thoughts are almost physically visible, moving across the faces of talented actors like clouds across the sky. This is made possible by two techniques that lie at the foundation of cinema itself: the closeup, which renders such subtlety visible, and the cut—the sudden switch from one image to another—which mimics the acrobatic nature of thought itself.