“In the Blink of an Eye” talked about the edition of film, especially in the work of cuts. The excerpt provided me many cool ideas to think about. And there are two points I found most interesting and surprising in the book, one is the six criteria for making a cut, and the second is the myth of why does cot work.
Murch ranked the six important elements when deciding a cut, from emotion and story as the most important to the continuity of dimensional space as the least important. This ranking is very novel to me as I previously held the idea that the coherent in spatial is very crucial to film cuts. While Murch argued that when the film is conveying the emotion and story in the right way, audience may neglect the incoherence in spaces. I found this ranking reasonable when I read the article and also when I thought about the movies I have seen. As in many situations I did not necessarily notice the cuts when I was into the plot or the emotions.
Murch provided two answers to the question that why human accept cuts so naturally. One is that in dreams, we may experience discontinuous stories. The other answer, the more fascinating one, is that human blinks create such discontinuity in real life. Murch related film cuts to human blinks and argued that an editor can determine a cut when feeling it is a potential moment for a blink, and that a good actor would blink in the same pace with the emotion of the character. His theory of blinks strikes me a lot because I never thought about blinks in this way, that the blinking behavior can have such significance. Human would blink to separate dialogues, feelings, and thoughts, transforming our continuous life into discrete pieces. And such behavior is done unconsciously in our brain. The comparison of the film cuts and human blinks made me have a more natural feeling about cuts. That film cuts no longer represents a distinguishable difference between movies and real life, but they become a tool to bring movie world into reality. That the movie story is more alike to the experience we have in everyday life.
Reference
Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. Silman-James Press, 2001.