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Movies Forum Index » Current Movies Forum » Walter Murch the famous editor is wrong to say film...
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| death from above... |
 Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 3:23 pm |
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recently, there was a review by stanley kauffmann (april 23, 1008) on
walter murch's article in the spring issue of some journal called
Three Penny Review. i never heard of the journal and i aint read
murch's stuff. but, murch's linking of cinema with dream 'language'
is mostly bogus. murch argues that early pioneers of cinema were
skeptical about editing because the cutting and pasting of space and
time violated our actual waking perception of reality--especially
significant in an artform known for its realism.
since we don't experience the dynamics and effects of editing in our
actual real-life experience, how can we expect the audience to make
sense out of a narrative which intercuts across various parcels or
snippets of reality? the wonder of cinema is that editing has not
only worked but seems natural to the viewer. murch argues that this
may be because mankind had always experienced dream reality where our
mind fuses and 'edits' various imagistic realities together. the
spatial illogic of a dream is still logical within its own realm. so,
perhaps, our minds had been hardwired thru evolution to accept editing
as something that seems natural and meaningful to us.
this is all wrong. for starters, cinema is the not the first artform
to use editing or, at least, the effect of editing. take music as an
expression of human emotions. even before sound recording, composers
'edited' or structured their works to switch suddenly from fast to
slow, loud to quiet, intense to mellow, impassioned to reflective, and
such and such. also, different melodic strands have been interwoven
to express a kind of higher or more intense 'reality'. or, take
literature and its use of something akin to editing. it goes from one
character to another, one setting to another, usually back and forth.
it enters one perspective and then another and then another. it goes
from subjective to objective or omnipotent perspective. it instantly
switches our focus of attention from this person to that person, from
this object to that object, from this feeling to that feeling.
or, take a painting. paintings are unrealistic for two reasons. for
one thing, it works by a framing device which violates our sense of
reality. in real reality, we may focus on a particular detail but
we are always attuned to the entire of field of vision. so, even if
we concentrate on a bird, we sense the sky above us and the ground
below us. framing device in paintings and films violate this sense of
real perception because everything is neatly contained within a
rectangular field of vision. what all these examples show is that the
human mind is flexible and creative enough to adapt to new ways of
seeing and feeling.
but, more importantly, our conscious mind--more than our dream state--
has always edited reality. editing in cinema is closer to our manner
of editing in waking reality than in dream reality. in dream
reality, the mental editing or visual motions have little logical
sense. indeed, dream languages melds more than edits. in movies--
except in some avant garde stuff--, editing is clearly meaningful in
the actual sense.
in truth, we don't focus on MOST of what our eyes or ears take in
waking life. so, for example, suppose you are focusing on a cat.
suppose you hear a weird sound outside your field of vision and turn
your head to the source of the sound. in effect, the waking-life-mind
edits from the cat to the source of the sound and pretty much blocks
out the blur you saw when turning your head. indeed, try this at
home. look at object A and then turn your head to see object B. your
mind will, in effect, cut from A to B. whatever your eyes saw during
the swivel motion amounts to almost zero.
this is why subjective-view camera schtick generally doesn't work in
cinema. it feels less real than the use of editing. in waking life,
we edit from one detail to another. even if our eyes are always
looking, our minds only stitch together details that interest us. in
a movie like 'lady in a lake'--which i haven't seen but heard about--,
the entire movie is seen thru the eyes of a character. so, one would
think it would be more realistic. actually, it's not because we're
forced to take in EVERY DETAIL within the character's field of
vision. the eyes do the seeing but the mind does the processing. the
eyes are merely the mechanical part of vision. the real process of
vision takes place in the brain, and the brain is always picking and
choosing. film editing processes information much like how our brain
processes visual stimuli the eyes take in; so, editing merely
replicates the activity of the brain. this is why a cut to a close-
up makes perfect sense to the viewer because our visual perception
instantly 'cuts' to new things that grab our attention. suppose there
is a park and a bench. suppose there's a woman and a man at the park.
suppose bob sits on the bench for 5 minutes and looks toward the park
without turning his head. after he leaves, suppose jane sits in the
same spot and looks toward the same general area without turning her
head for 5 minutes. will they have seen the same thing? mechanically
yes, but psychologically no. it's possible that bob may have focused
his vision on the woman whereas jane focused her vision on the man.
though they took in the generally same field of vision, they saw
something entirely different. bob's perception, in effect, cut to a CU
of the woman while jane's cut to a CU of the man. it's like eating
ice cream with pecan and cherry. if bob likes pecan, he will taste
more of the pecan than the cherry. if jane likes cherry, she will
taste more of the cherry than the pecan.
this is why long continuous subjective viewpoint in cinema doesn't
reflect how we actually see reality. also, notice that we experience
time differently depending on what we are doing. when we are having
fun, time rushes by. when it's dull and dreary, it goes on forever.
take the use of panning in cinema and why it's generally useless as a
subjective view thru the eyes of a character. generally, our
perception of reality doesn't smoothly or evenly pan across the
spatial field--unless we make an effort. generally when we turn our
heads, our perception goes from objects A to B to C back to B to A,
etc. indeed, this is why 'realistic' camera movement is often so
headache-inducing to moviegoers. even when we shake our heads, the
image before us is remarkably steady. even when we jog or move, our
brains steady what our eyes see. there are exceptions like when we're
tumbling down a steep incline or punched in the face. generally, our
minds come equipped with a natural steadi-cam device. otherwise,
joggers would throw up from all the juggly wuggly up and down
movement. this is why all those cinema-verite style handheld camera
movements feel less real than steadier visual styles. this is why
quick panning in movies seem overly dramatic and unreal. when we
quickly turn our heads from A to B, our minds hardly register the blur
during the head turn. when we see a movie, we notice the panning and
it doesn't seem real. indeed, editing from A to B feels more
realistic to the viewer.
this is why the concept of mise-en-scene as an higher or more truthful
ideal is futile. even if we are shown wholeness of space, our mind
never takes in anything as a whole. what the filmmaker doesn't edit
for us, our brains edit for ourselves. also, even without the editing,
the very use of lighting, words, movement of characters, placement of
objects, and such determine how our minds minds will 'edit' the
reality. for example, imagine a mise-en-scene where light falls on a
particular item. our mind will focus on that spot at the expense of
all else. or, suppose there is a lighter on the table, and characters
talks about the lighter. our minds will focus on or 'cut' to the
lighter. any whole-as-whole is pretty meaningless to our perception.
any image only makes to sense to us in parts. so, the montage vs mise-
en-scene argument was essentially bogus because mise-en-scene doesn't
so much negate or oppose editing as leave the editing process to the
viewer. our brains have no choice but to edit--pick and choose, piece
together one piece of reality with another. imagine a long shot of a
dark room. if a door creepily starts to open, our mind focuses and
edits our attention to the door at the expense of all else. the shift
in our focus is so sudden and quick that it has a defacto editing
effect.
or, consider how we read a newspaper. we don't pay attention to the
whole page nor even the entire paragraph. we focus our attention on
lines and lines of sentences. mise-en-scene approach will not work
with written material in cinema. suppose you wanna convey the idea
that the character is reading a sentence on a certain page. showing us
the image of the full page will not tell us which sentence he is
reading. the filmmaker can only make us know thru narration, close up
to the sentence, or editing thru a series of phrases. we may not see
like that in the mechanical sense as our eyes are not capable of zoom
effects and such. but, our minds 'see' like that, or process the
stimuli taken thru our eyes in that manner. our minds capture certain
images and, in effect, 'zooms' it up close--much of this is
emotional. consider the scene in Casino where joe pesci meets sharon
stone for the first time. mechanically, he was staring at her standing
within the particular space of the room. but, merely showing his
perspective on that part of the room would not have conveyed his
psychological wow at the sight of her. so, scorsese cuts from a more
conventional image of stone in the room to a CU of her face.
mechanically, this is not possible for the human eye. but, it is how
our minds work, and it has little or nothing to do with dreamstate.
our minds can capture images at a distance and then visualize them
close up. suppose you see a woman who's about 30 feet away. to feel
the impact of her beauty or ugliness, you don't need to walk up close
to her. even at that distance, your mind can focus on her image in a
closeup fashion.
now, returning to that scene in Casino, scorsese's brilliance was in
understanding that mental editing of reality isn't as neat or clean-
cut as classical editing in the movies. notice that scorsese didn't
cleanly edit from long shot of sharon stone to close up of her face.
he used a slight and split-second fuzzy-blur effect between the two
shots to convey the shift from conventional mechanical vision to
emotional/sensual mental vision.
suppose + means CU. so, A+ is close-up of A. whether one's real-life
perception goes from A to B or A to A+, there's a slight blurry shift
in one's consciousness. it's almost imperceptible yet it's there. our
sense of reality when we turn our heads doesn't neatly go from A to B
nor does it take in everything between A and B--as panning shots
suggest. rather, what we see is A--slight blur--B. one may ask, will
a swift pan do the trick? no. swift pan conveys a sense of panic,
desperation, and tension. consider the scene in the Wild Bunch after
the bounty hunters have shot old man sykes and then goes down to find
the body which is nowhere. deke thorton says sykes could be hiding
among the rocks and aiming his gun at them, whereupon the camera
hectically zooms and pans. the effect is jolting and nerve-wracking
than normal.
this is why any home movie that pans--quickly or slowly--from one
speaker to another never feels like reality. we feel we're being
shaken or swished back and forth, like clothes in a laundry machine.
our heads and eyes are very mobile but the vision of reality produced
in our minds are generally neatly packaged, steady, and stable.
cinema-verite, for this reason, feels less real than fiction
filmmaking with steadier/cleaner/neater gaze and construction. our
brains instantly construct all stimuli we take in and turn it into a
series of neat parcels of reality.
so, it's our waking-reality perception which has always been
cinematic. and, this is true of animals too. indeed, they must do
so in order to survive. a hawk that circles high above must learn to
spot a prey, focus on it, and adjust its perceptions with every
passing split second to catch it. and prey animals must be able to
concentrate and make sense of key stimuli in order to spot danger and
run like a mofo. a deer that is focusing on the grass must instantly
become aware of--'edit' to--danger signals. its brain must 'edit' from
awareness-of-grass immediately to awareness-of-predator if it's to
survive. any deer that takes in every stimuli between grass and
awareness of predator will be too slow. it must go instantly from
A(grass) to B(predator). all the stimuli between A and B might be
blocked out.
it's the faculty of biological/perceptual montagery than mise-en-
scenery that allows survival of the species. all organisms must focus
and 'edit' only what they need in order to catch prey or to run from
predator--or to find a mate. all consciousness works as a filter, and
editing is one of the tools of survival. mise-en-scene, in this
sense, is more of an expressive of spiritualism than realism. the
idea of taking in the whole of reality is a meditative concept and
effort. this is why mise-en-scene is the favored method of spiritual
artists such as bresson, mizoguchi, or tarkovsky. they wanna calm our
biological survivalist instincts and make us take in the sense of
wholeness and interconnectedness of EVERYTHING. of course, there is a
humbler kind of mise-en-scene-ism with artists such as ozu and renoir,
but notice that even they don't want to engage with the instinctual
dynamism of waking life. they wanna offer human reality or society
as a whole, which is, one could argue, more fair-minded and idealized
or idealistic. but, it's not how any person or animal experiences
reality. every reality is powerfully subjective and always focuses on
and 'edits' across what what is of emotional, economic, social, or
survivalist importance to us.
besides, one could argue that any image in a painting or a movie is an
edited fragment of reality framed from one perspective out of
countless many. even cubism doesn't depart much from this limitation.
after all, what is reality? there are over 6 billion people in the
world. doesn't choosing one person for a painting or story edit
everyone else out? also, there are countless ways to shoot that person
at different times and places and thru various angles. so, wholeness
of perception is impossible. even the wholeness of a mise-en-scene
shot is merely a single wholeness out of countless possibilities.
there is no such thing as perceptual wholeness. EVERY image can only
be seen or visualized from one angle. suppose bob and jane are
standing opposite one another and between them is a fish bowl.
suppose their perceptions can be merged into one. it would make no
sense.
there is also the function of memory and imagination--the stuff that
takes place in the mind's eye. this has always been a free zone of
editory processing among organisms with capacity for memory and visual
imaging. suppose you're thinking back to what happened last month.
you don't remember every detail but rather pick and choose different
pieces of what you remember and stitch them together into a mind's-eye
narrative. this has little to do with dreamstate but with the ability--
and the necessity--to filter data in our memorybank. otherwise, we
wouldn't be able to function or learn. for example, suppose bob is
told to pick up someone wearing a red hat at the train station. so, he
forms an image of a red hat in his mind. when he gets to train
station, his memory will have to recall the signifcance of the red hat
while blocking out all other--countless--bits and pieces in his memory
storage. as he looks around at the station, his eyes have to quickly
move around and ignore everything but the red hat on some woman.
or, consider an animal that got bitten by a snake and suffered nastily
and barely survived. its memory will need to produce a stark
narrative that says something-that-looks-long-and-windy / gives a
painful bite / made me sick and suffer. suppose the place where the
snake attack occurred has a stream, some leaves on the ground,
pebbles, ants crawling around, etc, etc. the animal must be able to
block all that 'trivial' stuff out of his memory. and, it must also
block out much of what happened. suppose in the shock and pain, the
animal spun around and stepped on elk shit, bumped its head on a tree,
and peed all over itself. those are not essential to what must be
remembered and learned from the incident. to learn the proper lesson,
the animal's memory and mind-eye must be able to focus on the crucial
details--snake is dangerous and no good. only this ability will
enable the animal to be cautious when it approaches another snake in
the future. this is why the donkey in Au Hasard Balthasar is such a
sad creature. being dumb and stubborn, it suffers all the arrows of
life without understanding what-the-hell-is-up and without the ability
to choose the good/necessity over the bad/nasty. .
so, the editory faculty or the ability to 'edit'--pick-n-choose,
quicky discrimate among stimuli and construct into neat packages of
meaning--is the product of our waking biological need to survive in a
dangerous world. if anything, dream reality is counter to the editing
because everything tends to melt and morph into one. this is why
people hallucinating on drugs would have no chance of survival in
dangerous places. in Apocalypse Now, one guy takes acid during a
battle and just stares at the explosions like 'it's far-out'. the
drugs have weakened the filters in his brain. his mind is taking
everything in whole. it's not able to edit between bits and pieces of
reality. this is why mise-en-scene in the films of dreyer,
tarkovsky, and mizoguchi are so dreamy and spiritual-feeling. montage
or editing always jolts us back to reality. A streaming into B is
more dreamy than A cutting to B. every cut alerts our senses whereas
a slow pan or tracking shot can be hypnotic. this is why tarkovsky had
that long scene on the the tracks in Stalker. with minimal editing
amidst the changing landscape, we fall into a trance--what we
sometimes experience on long train trips as we look out the window.
this is why we must differentiate between mechanical reality and
psychological reality. all of reality is mechanically consumed but
psychologically processed. it is for this reason that b/w films and
photos can be more powerfully real than color photos and films. we
often think in terms of stories or narratives than details. in
storytelling, color is less important than the narrative of what
happened--unless the color of an object is relevant to the story. this
is why it's foolish for newspapers to use color photos. readers are
interested in the fact than the detail. suppose condi rice met with
some some palestinian leader. the only reality that matters to us is
that condi met with whoozits, not the color of condi's dress at the
meeting. color often distracts us from the narrative. when we see
images of a terrible natural disaster, the striking color of areas hit
by the storm or earthquake distracts our attention from the fact of
the human tragedy.
when it comes to the news, we expect images to function as words, as
narratives than as images of actuality. notice that words on a page
are all black. if an object being described is blue, we don't expect
the word denoting that object to be blue--unless the color is relevant
to the story. so, if after the meeting with the palestinian leader,
condi got in a blue car and rode away, the word 'car' doesn't have to
be in blue ink. nor, does it have to be written that condi left in a
'blue car'. all that matters is she left in a car. so, b/w is more
than adequate and indeed often more powerful in conveying certain
stark stories and narratives than color. indeed, much of what we see
in our mind's eye is often colorless--again, unless a particular color
is relevant or pertinent to the story or narrative. if you think back
to a classroom back in highschool, the color of every object matters
far less than the fact that you'd once learned in that classroom.
even within the same or constant field of vision, our eyes never
blankly stare at the whole unless we're zonked out--usually the case
when all the hormones is sucked out of us(removal of hormones reduces
our survivalist instincts.). rather, our eyes alertly dart and flash
about from one detail to another. so, our perception is never smoothly
consistent or whole-ish but made up of shifting fragments of stimuli
that our eyes take in constantly. suppose you are sitting facing a
room.and never move your head or move your eyes only slightly.
suppose one woman enters into your field of vision from the left and
picks up her keys and departs. simultaneously, another woman enters
into your field of vision from the right, stands for awhile, picks up
an apple and departs. your eyes cannot possibly see the entirety of
this. even though everything happened in your field of vision, your
perception of reality will have been knitted from all the fragments
and bits and pieces of details and movements that your eyes took in
and your brain processed.
depending on which woman you focused on more, the reality of what took
place before you would have been different. this is why magicians can
pull their tricks. they play with our editory faculty thru the art of
distraction.
and, this is why a movie can seem very different upon second or third
viewing. it's the same movie but you may notice different things in
subsequent viewings. it all depends on what your mind focuses on(this
is why a mise-en-scene-rich movie like Playtime can be 100 different
things to an 100 different people).
conventionally, film editing is invisible to the viewer because it
appromixates the way our mind processes visual information. when a
scene cuts from one detail to another, it approximates how an actual
mind focuses on and shifts from different details and movements in a
room in a given situation. imagine a mystery thriller film. suppose
we feel the presence of some evil person in the room. we suspect that
he's carrying a bomb. suppose one of the people in the room looks
suspicious. suppose the scene cuts to CU to that person. the editing
in this case isn't jarring because it approximates the operation of
actual perception. in a similar situation in actual reality, our
attention will also instantly shift to the person who's suspected of
some evil intent.
now, suppose the scene had cut to a coffee machine in the room than to
the suspected evil bomber. that would be jarring because it's the last
thing we expect to pay attention to. we wanna focus on the suspected
evil bomber. of course, the cut to the coffee machine could have been
to indicate that the object may have something to do with the bombing
plot. perhaps, the trigger to the bomb has been placed in the coffee
pot. but, without such meaning, the cut to the coffee machine would
have been pointless. godard liked to go for meaningless cuts as an
alienating device to jolt us into realizing that we're watching a film
than reality.
in most cases, the filmmakers try to make the editing as invisible as
possible. we want the fabric of time to be knitted together
seamlessly. but, there are times when the editing is obvious but
striking--in a way, more real than real. this is not how actual
perception works but has the effect of heightening our awareness of
things. eisenstein was the master at this. even so, the sum effect of
these cuts must exclaim some form of intelligibility, relatedness,
meaning. so, even highly stylized or unrealistic editing is
essentially an intense and heightened--idealized or monumentalized god-
like version--of the basic editory process.
music does pretty much the same thing. all around us, there are all
kinds of sounds and buzzes and noises. usually, our minds shape what
comes thru our ears and categorizes them and renders them
intelligible. what we hear is not so much what comes thru our ears as
what our minds chooses and shapes from the aural stimuli. this is why
it's near impossible to understand what two people are saying at the
same time. our ears may take in the spoken words of both speakers but
can only make sense of one person at a time; the other person's words
are just a buzz or a kind of background noise.
and, music composers and performers are well aware of how we hear and
process sound. this is why music has a certain 'language' and form.
there is a thing called rhythm, beat, harmony, melody, etc. any
sound is not music--unless it's some cranky modern music based on
academic theory. there is a way our minds process sounds and render
them meaningful or intelligible. music isn't realistic but still
plays by the rules of how our minds really work. so, for a music to
go from loud to quiet, fast to slow, it has to conform to a languge of
'editing' that makes the two sides fit. even DJs who mix together
different styles of music need to know the art of fitting and
carpentering different modes. the thing gels only when there's some
kind of invisible glue that holds it together. this is why if one were
to arbitrarily switch back and forth between every 5 seconds of a
beethoven sympathy with every 5 seconds of a bach sonata, the result
will end be meaningless crap. different segments of music must be
fused together in a way that feels natural and whole.
it's funny that while our senses cannot take in reality as a whole,
the stimuli are constructed into a vision or conception of the whole
within our minds. indeed, our brains fill in the missing details.
this process is so quick and powerful that we often mistake the detail-
filled-in-by-the-brain as what we actually saw. this is why many eye-
witnesses accounts are so inaccurate though the witnesses are totally
sincere in relating what they saw or heard. they heard bits and
pieces but their minds--with storage of data--filled all the cracks.
so, if someone ran off with some object in hand, your mind may
convince that you saw a gun in his hand. this is also true of how we
remember certain movies. certain scenes that we remember in certain
way turn out to be very different upon second viewing.
so, mental processes matter more than sensory apparatuses. consider
slo-motion. there isn't any such in actual perception--unless one
gets into a bad accident and goes into a kind of lala-state for a few
seconds. but, as sam peckinpah demonstrated, slo-motion can seem
natural to us because certain moments of reality can be drawn out by
our perceptual process. this is especially true in the workings of
the 'mind's eye'. suppose you went to a ballgame and saw a great
play. that moment will play over and over in your mind in a kind of
slo-motion mode because you relish it so much. also, the ability to
think in terms of slo-motion in the mind's eye was probably necessary
for human progress. all thru human history, man thought about how
certain things worked--especially certain things which moved or
operated really fast. for example, a warrior needs to be able to
figure out the fighting methods of the enemy. after withdrawing from
battle, he needs to understand what kind of fighting motions the enemy
employed in the use of swords or axes. as we all know, martial arts
isn't just about force but about method. this is why many martial
arts demonstrate bodily movements in slow motion so that students can
see how it's done. so, a nimble mind thru history was able to perform
a kind of slo-mo imaging within the mind's eye.
also, editing takes place in the mind's eye when someone writes,
reads, or hears a story. a storyteller picks and chooses details and
then stitches them together into a continuous narrative. the narrative
flows but the details are actually fragmentary. this actually happens
with words themselves. words are made up of syllables but we don't
hear a series of fragmented sounds but get the impression of flowing
stream of sounds. for example, 'henderson' doesn't sound like hen-der-
son but henderson.
now, imagine reading a story about a duel. instead of describing
everything--which could be infinite within any setting(after all, the
writer could focus on every grain of sand, every fallen leaf, every
hair on the duelists, etc)--, the writers only picks and chooses the
pertinent details. the glaring stare. the careful steps to move into
striking or defensive position. the hand clenching the sword handle.
the sweat on the forehead. the sun setting in the distance. when you
read such narrative, the mind's eye 'edits' from one visual image to
another. so, this is how we basically think. our minds have always
edited stimuli that the visual and auditory organs ingested in order
to 'make sense of' the data. otherwise, the mind wouldn't be able to
distinguish anything from anything. everytime the mind shifts focus
from one object to another, it is performing an editory function. so,
if a scientist's attention goes from his computer screen to data on a
piece of paper, it edits from computer screen to the data--and to and
from images in his conceptual mind's eye. the scientist blocks out
all the other detail--like the cup and paper clips on the table, the
scenery out the window, and painting hanging on the wall. what most
filmmakers try to do is to convey a sense of reality that feels
subjectively real.
where cinema is differnt from normal waking reality is it can shift
back and forth from various perspectives/perceptions. it also
incorporates the objective viewpoint that doesn't belong to any single
character. but, even this is part of waking life. even though we see
everything only thru our eyes, our minds are always imaging different
perspectives. it's the function of our curiosity and our empathy--and
even sympathy. so, if we can share and identify with the feelings of
other people, we can also try to see and hear from their points of
view. and this is natural in novel writing which shifts--or edits--
from various perspectives--different characters, the omnipotent
narrator, etc. and, in many cases, many people do feel like an
omnipotent observer because our eyes and ears are directed externally
than internally. unless we look into a mirror, we don't see ourselves
but other people. though locked within our bodies, we live by
observing other people. though our view is always subjective, it can
also feel objective because it can freely observe persons A, B, C, D,
etc outside of ourselves. when you observe jane speak to bob, you
feel like an objective viewer. |
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