In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing

Have you ever edited a film? Are you likely to? Probably not (though in the age of iMovie, you are more likely than you used to be). But most of the readers who have made Murch's elegant little guidebook a classic were not looking for practical advice (though it has plenty, embedded in tales from his work on films such as The Conversation, The English Patient, and Apocalypse Now). Rather, they were drawn by Murch's flexible, philosophical mind, which takes the central questions of his arcane, often lonesome craft—when do you cut? how do you organize a story?—and answers them with an entertaining meditation on human nature and creativity. It could change the way you think about almost anything you make.