My favorite bit of Net I came across yesterday was the video artist Josh Melnick's interview excerpt with Walter Murch, the polymath best known for editing Coppola's early '70s masterpieces, on the Paris Review blog. I must have read Murch talking about cutting on the blink of an eye in at least four places by now (his book, titled appropriately In the Blink of an Eye, as well as The Conversations, his book-length confab with Michael Ondaatje, and my favorite technical manual ever, Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain on Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema--all excellent books!), and I haven't had enough yet.
Here's his discussion of the blink this time:
Like most people, I was oblivious to blinking until The Conversation, which was the first feature that I edited. I had the repeated, uncanny experience of watching Gene Hackman’s close-ups and deciding where to cut—He put the tape down, and now he’s thinking about what he’s going to do with the tape and … cut. Very frequently, more frequently than I would have thought, the point that I decided to cut was the point that Hackman blinked. I thought, That’s peculiar. Then, after one session that lasted all night, I went out to get some breakfast. It was a Sunday morning, and I passed a Christian Science reading room in San Francisco, down in the SoMA district. They had a copy of the Christian Science Monitor. John Huston had just finished Fat City, and there was an interview with him about the film. The topic of editing came up, and he said to the interviewer, “Look at me. Now look at that lamp. Now look at me. Did you see what you did?” “No.” “Well, you blinked. When you changed subject, you blinked. That’s what the cut is.” And I suddenly thought, Aha! He was doing it along with a change of visual frame, but I realized we also blink with a change in our interior view.
When we change thoughts?
Blinking is some way of tabulating—a kind of carriage return, click, or save to disk—that helps the process of “Okay, now change the subject.” Every time you move your eyes, there’s an interruption in the visual field—you go momentarily blind when your eyeballs are moving. In order not to freak us out, the brain, almost condescendingly, inserts the last thing that we looked at, which has been stored in a sort of cache.
The motion of the eyes is the fastest motion in the body. The displacement of the eye has the most rapid acceleration and rapid deceleration. No other muscle can do it like the eye can. Ninety-nine percent of the time we’re dealing with somebody, we’re looking at their eyes. We’re not looking at their nose or their lips or whatever. So without knowing it, we have incorporated this idea of blinking into how we’re dealing with people. Can we trust them, or not? Are they telling the truth? It’s a perennial problem for politicians, because they’re up there giving a speech and, most often, they’re not really in the moment. They’re reading a text, and they’re thinking about ten thousand different things. Their mouth is in motor mode. As a result, their blinks are off, especially with the ones that don’t get elected. We don’t trust them. We say there’s something funny about this guy, and we don’t know what it is. A good percentage of that is the fact that he’s not blinking at the right place. Dan Quayle was notorious for this.
Of course the bit I love is that he had this moment of serendipity with Huston when he wandered into a Christian Science reading room.
The interview also made me want to see Melnick's video installation, The 8 Train, and the accompanying book by the same name, said to be coming out this spring but not listed yet on Amazon. (Although since the majesty of his ultra-slow-motion videos seems to come from movement, I'm not sure how it will translate to a book. But at least the book will have more interview with Walter Murch!) There seem to be no clips of The 8 Train online, but I did find this interview with Melnick, where he talks about the setting he chose for its silent, slo-mo portraits of (mostly) strangers:
The subway was the only place to shoot this project. Not only because of the photographic history of reportage photos of people on the subway that in some ways this project references, but because the subway itself creates a liminal trance-like state in people—it rocks back and forth, it’s dark, and it’s underground. There’s something very dreamlike about the subway to begin with and it’s also the place where there are barriers between people, these unspoken barriers. I grew up in NYC and have spent so much time on the trains. I’m fascinated by them.
And you can get a sense of the technique from his video for Cat Power's "Where Is My Love?" (unembeddable, alas), in which the second-most-dramatic moment (at least after all this discussion) is the man blinking from 1:29 to 1:33, although, as Melnick himself says he felt while editing it, I just wanted the camera to linger on each figure longer, through the gradual but monumental changes in their expression, rather than cut as relatively quickly as it does.
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