The Book Every Editor Has to Read — Walter Murch and In the Blink of an Eye

That's what the cut is.

The cut is a blink in between two focuses of attention.

Walter Murch is one of the most respected film editors of all time.

And his book, 'In the Blink of an Eye', is a seminal text for anyone who wants to better understand the art of editing.

In this video, we'll look at Walter Murch's editing philosophy and examine why it continues to be so influential.

This is 'In the Blink of an Eye: Explained'.

Before we get cutting, be sure to subscribe to StudioBinder and click the bell to stay up to date on more of our videos.

Time to fire up the flatbed.

To understand why, 'In the Blink of an Eye', is so important, one must know its author's background.

Walter Murch is a groundbreaking editor and sound designer.

He came to prominence in the late 60s and 70s and was an integral part of the New Hollywood movement.

Murch has worked with filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, and his filmography is legendary.

He has won three Academy Awards and been nominated nine times.

Nine times.

For his pioneering work on 'Apocalypse Now', Murch became the first person to be credited as a sound designer.

In 1995, he published 'In the Blink of an Eye', based on a lecture he gave about editing in Sydney, Australia.

The book has since become one of the most popular books on editing ever.

And in 2001, Murch released a second edition, which added a discussion of digital editing.

In it, he touches on various topics that can be grouped into why cuts work, the rule of six, and an editor's job.

Let's look at the core of Murch's editing philosophy.

Why cuts work?

Cuts are jumps in space or time, and sometimes both.

So, how do they avoid confusing or distracting an audience?

In his book, Murch interrogates this central question in film editing.

He notes that cutting as we know it today did not exist for much of early cinema.

- Editing was not invented along with motion pictures.

It was a number of years before somebody had the idea of putting these images together to tell a coherent story.

- Eventually, filmmakers learned that two distinct images could be placed together.

And audiences could not only follow it, but they could make meaning out of the juxtaposition.

When this discovery was made, Murch writes, 'Films were no longer earthbound'.

In other words, film's full narrative and aesthetic potential was realized with the advent of the cut.

But why exactly are audiences not perturbed by a cut?

The answer, Murch argues, lies in the blink.

He explains that although it seems like we experience the world continuously, we actually experience cuts every time we close our eyes.

When we're in conversation, for example, we blink at moments that feel natural to us.

Murch argues that a blink occurs when a thought is fully formed, writing, 'We entertain an idea.

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'.

Merch takes this theory even further, claiming that he uses an actor's blinks to inform how he edits.

In 'The Conversation', for example, he found that he was cutting close to where Gene Hackman was blinking since it subconsciously signaled that he had completed his thought.

- You have to feel the moment where you're going to cut and at the appropriate moment, over and over again, much more than chance.

Within a few frames of that mark, Gene Hackman would blink.

There's something going on there.

- By editing with these blink points in mind, Murch argues that you also control how the audience is meant to process the information.

In this way, you are blinking for the audience to underscore the ideas and emotions of the characters.

And so in Murch's theory, if the editor can find the right rhythm of a scene, they could make the entire audience blink at the same time.

The opposite of this editing approach is what Murch calls the dragnet system.

Named after the 50s detective show where cuts were made after each line.

- Just gonna get the phone for you. - I'll take care of the phone.

- This style creates a punchy rhythm of its own.

But for Murch, it ignores the nuances of our everyday conversations.

- Could I ask you please to um, paste your paintings into my book?

I should like to have them. I should be honored.

Murch likens editing to another universal human experience.

Dreaming.

- Movies are dreams, darling, that you never forget.

- According to Murch, editing often imitates dreams, where we typically make sense out of combinations of images.

As Merch writes, 'We accept the cut because it resembles the way images are juxtaposed in our dreams. In fact, the abruptness of the cut may be one of the key determinants in actually producing the similarity between films and dreams. In the darkness of the theater, we say to ourselves, in effect, this looks like reality.

But it cannot be reality because it is so visually discontinuous.

Therefore, it must be a dream'.

This idea can be particularly applied to editing techniques like the Kuleshov effect, where two different images are placed together and create a third, separate meaning.

Mertzsch also uses natural phenomena to influence how he edits in space.

He gives us an analogy about bees and their hive.

Bees are not confused if their hive is moved miles from its original location.

But Murch writes, if the hive is moved two yards, the bees will become fatally confused.

The environment does not seem different to them, so they do not reorient themselves.

The same goes for editing.

Cutting to a shot that is too similar to the shot before can be jarring to an audience.

A good rule of thumb, therefore, is to cut to a shot where and the camera is at an angle that is at least 30 degrees away from the previous shot.

This is commonly known as the 30-degree rule.

But Murch argues that spatial considerations should not be the primary concern of an editor.

This brings us to Murch's Rule of Six.

Perhaps the most famous passage in 'In the Blink of an Eye' is Murch's list of priorities when making a cut.

He ranks each consideration by importance and labels the resulting list the rule of six.

Murch writes that the foremost job of an editor is to establish an interesting coherent rhythm of emotion and thought.

As such, he prioritizes emotion, claiming it is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs.

- Emotion is whatever this shot is and the cut to the next shot.

How does it make you feel?

And is that feeling what you want for the film at this point in its storytelling?

- The second consideration is story advancement.

A cut should be necessary to push a narrative forward.

- Do you understand what's going on with the characters, with their motivations, with what's happening in the plot?

- Next is rhythm.

Is the cut happening at the right point in a musical sense, or is it like a drummer who comes in too late or too soon?

- Count again. - One, two, three, four.

- One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

- Rushing or dragging? - Rushing.

- So you do know the difference!

- Murch notes that the 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.

In other words, finding the emotion of a cut will likely lead to progressing the story and creating the right rhythm.

The fourth consideration is eye trace.

This refers to where the audience's eye is focused in a frame.

If they are likely looking at the upper right section of a shot then a cut where the subject is also in the upper right will feel more natural.

- You construct the film to direct their attention by where you place the cut and where the focus of interest is on the incoming shot.

- Next, an editor should think about what Murch calls planarity which is often labeled an 180-degree rule.

The shots being cut together should generally not cross the line of action established by the opening shot of a sequence.

The final consideration is three-dimensional continuity, which Murch describes as where people are in the room and in relation to one another.

To sum up, Murch argues, if the emotion is right and the story is advanced in a unique, interesting way in the right rhythm, then the audience will tend to be unaware of editorial problems with lower order items like eye trace, stage line, and spatial continuity.

In other words, he holds that typically satisfying items higher on the list will obscure problems with items lower on the list, but not vice versa.

In the end, Murch describes a successful edit as when the shots themselves seem to create each other.

Finally, Murch spends a good portion of his book describing the logistics of an editor's job.

While Murch's high-level philosophizing is vital, his discussion of the on-ground reality of an editor's day-to-day is also crucial.

The first step is to have a plan.

An editor must make thousands of decisions in every scene.

When receiving dailies, Murch recommends finding a still from each shot that best represents it.

He argues that this will help down the line when an editor has to pick which takes to use.

When actually editing, Murch famously insists on standing.

He explains, 'Editing is a kind of dance.

The finished film is a kind of crystallized dance.

And when have you ever seen a dancer sitting down to dance'?

- Somehow this is important for me because it allows me to internalize the rhythms, the visual rhythms of what's happening.

- Murch also notes that collaborating with directors is an integral part of an editor's job.

He argues that while it is important to help a director realize their vision, directors typically have their own limits.

Especially when it comes to the smaller details.

And that is where an editor must step up with their own ideas.

Murch also emphasizes that directors often come in with preconceptions based on their experiences on set.

And it is an editor's role to try to see only what's on the screen, as the audience will.

- I make it a principle not to go on the set.

Not to see the actors out of costume.

Not to see anything other than the images that come to me from location.

And that's how it's going to look to the audience.

- But an editor can only anticipate an audience's reaction so much.

This is where feedback from test audiences comes in.

Audiences, he claims, are good at noticing when something isn't working.

But they aren't good at pointing out why.

When you ask the direct question, what was your least favorite scene, and 80 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.

Whether editing, analog or digital, Murch's philosophy holds as true today as it did in the 1970s.

No matter what happens on set, no matter how many visual effects are required, almost all movies are still built on simple cuts.

An editor's job doesn't have to start in post-production.

The collaboration can start with a script, the storyboard, or the shot list.

This is the kind of collaboration StudioBinder was built for.

Get started on your next project with the sign up link below.

For more on the art of editing, watch our in-depth interview with "Top Gun: Maverick" editor, Eddie Hamilton, and step-by-step tutorials on the StudioBinder Academy channel.

Until next time, remember, with a great editor, sometimes you can fix it in post.