Well Worth Your Time

I'm Re-watching This Tonight

No, Not the Fincher Movie

But this bit of vandalism is on every Lemonade Insurance sign I’ve run across. And, no, I didn’t do it myself. I did snap this picture.

I’ll Be Re-Watching the Documentary “The Cinema Within”

It’s currently streaming on Kanopy, and most people can watch it for free thanks to their local libraries. It also appears to be on Amazon Prime. On Kanopy I can revisit the film over the course of seventy-two hours, so — of course — I’ll be watching it at least three times. Divorce court looms.

Overall, the documentary explores film editing and why such a system of transitions seems so natural to viewers. The Walter Murch book In the Blink of an Eye provides much of the material. A massive eternal Thank You to you guys for sending me a copy.

Not to spoil the surprise, but Murch has found that human beings appear to process their waking lives by “editing” awareness into blink-sized bites of information. The director John Huston comes on screen to curse “panning shots,” and the science seems to support his view. Per this documentary, as we shift our focus from one detail to another this blurred shift is a Seccade. The chaotic refocusing doesn’t seem to send information to the brain, so Huston seems justified in his disdain for pan (or panning) shots. The documentary explains this better.

Do the cuts in films also correlate to the sentences in a story? To the appropriate length for paragraphs? Even to single-word paragraphs? By studying film edits we might find new/better ways to present our prose.

In prose, Tom Spanbauer referred to such a transition as “manumission.” Tom would pretend to hold a raw egg in one palm, then gently pass that egg into his opposite palm. Passing the egg back and forth, he’d say, “This egg is your reader.” The point is to never jar or awaken your reader from the dream you’re presenting, okay?

Furthermore, The Cinema Within also looks at how we blink in unison as we watch a film for the first time. And how we seem to blink at the point when an idea fully registers in our mind. In effect, we’re still prey animals. We enter each novel setting wide eyed and wary. Our focus jumps to any possible danger. Picture the famous series of jumpy cuts in The Bride of Frankenstein, shown here.

Only once we feel safe can we blink. Even when we’re assembled in a large audience.

As storytellers, we’re always wondering how long to drone on. Should a sentence be short and pithy to create tension. Or long and lulling… before disaster strikes. Ira Levin’s son, Nicholas, told me that his father was an avid theater geek and would sit through staging after staging of each play — Deathtrap — always listening for the version in which no viewer coughed or fidgeted. Only when a version could keep the entire audience spellbound did Iran Levin consider it worthwhile.

Since the first rules of Fight Club, I’ve always been obsessed with how to edit prose like film. How can we cut, cut, cut, instead of using wordy shifts such as “… while Anthony pondered the gradual change in Estelle’s countenance, the silverware took on a deepening tarnish even as the full moon traversed from pane to pane in the dining-room casements…” Yeah, no. I hate that. And I’d rather you bought a copy of the Walter Murch book or paid to watch The Cinema Within, than pay for me to rehash such good information from both. Go to the source! These should be in your go-to library.

Where do you cut a scene or chapter or sentence? And how. How do you manage the transition — the comics great Brian Bendis always tells his students, “The transition is EVERYTHING.” And you can reinvent a fresh form of transition for each story or book. AND that new form of transition can be organic to the book itself.

For now. Watch the documentary. Those ancient people they show in Turkey look exactly like my father’s extended family.

Yeah, and Slush Pile is tomorrow night, beginning at 6:30. I’ll be sitting in the audience like Ira Levin, waiting to hear if you can hold listeners spellbound.

And don’t think for a moment that I’ve forgotten about Animal House. Watch it, too.

Is there an Animal House/Animal Farm link, do you think? The horse does die in both… That’s not the prize question, but I’ll post the real question soon.