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

by Walter Murch

At home, you are king, and the television is your jester. If you are not amused, you take out the remote control and chop off his head! The framework of home viewing is familiarity: What is right is what fits with the routine, which implies a mind-set that sees only what it wants—or is prepared—to see.

Going out, however, involves some expense, inconvenience, and risk. Remember that you will be sitting in a dark room with as few as six, or as many as six hundred strangers—perhaps even more. No distractions, no way to stop the film once it starts, and it starts at a certain time whether or not you are there. This produces a mind set that is open to experience in a way that home viewing can never replicate. Most mysteriously important, however, are those six or six hundred strangers sitting with you, whose muffled presence alters and magnifies the nature of what

Murch directed and co-wrote the film Return to Oz, released by Disney in 1985.