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

by Walter Murch

Always try to do the most with the least—with the emphasis on try. You may not always succeed, but attempt to produce the greatest effect in the viewer’s mind by the least number of things on screen. Why? Because you want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience—suggestion is always more effective than exposition.

What they finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story—it’s how they felt.

Well, if you learn to speak a foreign language, you will find that there is a gap between how well you can speak it and how well you can understand it when it is spoken to you. A human being’s ability to understand a foreign language is always greater than his ability to speak it.

“212-4: NG.” What does that mean? It meant that at the time you thought take four of Slate 212 was No Good, and you didn’t bother to make a note of why you thought so.

adds just about the right amount of chaos that I need in order to work the way I want to.

I would always review the material twice: once at the beginning, the day after the material was shot, noting down my first impressions and including any notes the director cares to give me. And then when I was ready to cut a particular scene, I would collect all the relevant material and review it again, making notes in more detail than the first time.

The most helpful thing of all is simply learning how you feel when the film is being shown to 600 people who have never seen it before.

Don’t necessarily operate on the elbow: instead, discover if nerves are being pinched somewhere else. But the audience will never tell you that directly. They will simply tell you where the pain is, not the source of the pain.

But my heart was in my throat because at that stage in the process you do not know; you can only have faith that what you are doing is the right thing.

Anyway, another one of your tasks as an editor is this “sensitizing” of yourself to the rhythms that the (good) actor gives you, and then finding ways to extend these rhythms into territory not covered by the actor himself, so that the pacing of the film as a whole is an elaboration of those patterns of thinking and feeling.

Your job is partly to anticipate, partly to control the thought processes of the audience. To give them what they want and/or what they need just before they have to “ask” for it—to be surprising yet selfevident at the same time. If you are too far behind or ahead of them, you create problems, but if you are right with them, leading them ever so slightly, the flow of events feels natural and exciting at the same time.

Without their knowing why, a poorly edited film will cause the audience to hold back, unconsciously saying to themselves, “There’s something scattered and nervous about the way the film is thinking, the way it presents itself. I don’t want to think that way; therefore, I’m not going to give as much of myself to the film as I might.” Whereas a good film that is well-edited seems like an exciting extension and elaboration of the audience’s own feelings and thoughts, and they will therefore give themselves to it, as it gives itself to them.

So the queasy feeling in the pit of the stomach of every editor beginning a project is the recognition— conscious or not—of the immense number of choices he or she is facing.

“The director is the ringmaster of a circus that is inventing itself.”