Psychocinematics: With Movies in Mind

On a recent trip to Princeton University, I had the opportunity to visit the Thomas Edison National Historic Park , in West Orange, New Jersey (about an hour drive from the campus). At this large laboratory complex, Edison invented the Kinetoscope, one of the first commercially successful motion picture viewers (the one in the photo is from the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY). Edison's interest in moving pictures was sparked in 1888 by a visit from Eadweard Muybridge who had already built a motion picture projector but one that could only present a dozen or so images in succession (e.g., a galloping horse). Edison's device was not a movie projector but instead a large one-person viewing console in which about 40 ft of 35 mm film strip passed by a peephole. The film was illuminated by stroboscopic flashes that were produced by a spinning opaque disk with an open slit that was placed between the film strip and a lamp. In this way, frames were flashed as ins

Walter Murch, the preeminent editor of such movies as Apocalypse Now (1979), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), The English Patient (1996), and Cold Mountain (2003), wrote an incisive book on film editing called In the Blink of an Eye . In it, he said that editors must be preoccupied with "misdirection" and keep in mind the following questions: "What is the audience going to be thinking at any particular moment? Where are they going to be looking? What do you want them to think about? And, of course, what do you want them to feel?" (Murch, 2001, page 21). In the fast-paced rhythm of current Hollywood blockbusters where cuts are interspersed every 3-5 seconds, film editors must ask themselves these questions about 1200 times per movie. The essential skill of a film editor is to create shot transitions that are so smooth that we are blind to them. In this way, outstanding editors keep us from being aware of their own craft. We are familiar