What is In the Blink of an Eye about?

In the Blink of an Eye is Walter Murch's extended meditation on film editing — what it is, why it works, and what an editor is actually doing when they cut from one image to another. Murch, whose credits include Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and The English Patient, writes from decades of practice, and the book has the authority of someone who has spent a career thinking carefully about a craft that is rarely examined theoretically.

The title comes from the observation that we blink, on average, at the emotional and cognitive moments where a cut would naturally occur — at the end of a thought, at a shift in attention, at a resolution of tension. Murch uses this to argue that film editing is not an artificial convention imposed on audiences but something that corresponds to how the mind naturally processes experience. A well-placed cut feels natural because it mimics the blink of attention.

The most cited part of the book is Murch's hierarchy of editing criteria. He identifies six qualities he weighs when deciding where to cut: emotion (how the cut makes the audience feel), story (does it advance what needs advancing), rhythm (is this the right moment in the musical flow), eye-trace (where the eye is looking), planarity (the two-dimensional balance of the frame), and three-dimensional continuity (spatial coherence). Emotion comes first; spatial continuity comes last. The film industry convention at the time Murch was writing weighted these in roughly the reverse order, and the hierarchy is a clear, deliberate argument about where craft priorities should lie.

The book also addresses the transition from film to digital editing. Murch was among the first major editors to cut a feature on a computer — The English Patient on Avid — and he reflects on what changes and what is lost when the physical handling of film is replaced by a cursor. The analog process imposed a discipline of choice; digital encourages indecision and over-cutting. This section, written in 1995, has proved prescient.

The book is short and concentrated — more essay than manual. It will not teach you to edit, but it will give you a way of thinking about editing, and about what makes any time-based art feel right.