Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, Walter Murch, c. March, 2025.

Initial post: 7/28/25.
Updates:

• June, 2026  

The Notes 

Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, Walter Murch, c. March, 2025.

Introduction

Page 3: "Motion pictures and cinema were NOT born simultaneously." 

The Lumière brothers sent representatives to Nizhny Novgorod (renamed Gorky) in 1896 to showcase their new Cinématographe at the All-Russia Industrial and Art Exhibition, the largest trade fair in the Russian Empire.

Note: cinema. In fact, it was simply "moving photography," not art, projected on a bedsheet at an elegant brothel. At that time, Maxim Gorky, 28 years old, was a reporter, taking notes on the event. Gorky was unimpressed. Gorky's remarkable recoil: an example of uncanny valley -- that queasy feeling inspired by an image that closely simulates reality but doesn't go quite far enough, as if the image were, zombie-like, alive and dead at the same time. 

Uncanny valley: link here to wiki -- it's a real phenomenon. 

Never quit reading. This is truly amazing. On the very first page of this book: "uncanny valley." See wiki. So incredibly relevant at this moment in time.

As related to robotics engineering, robotics professor Masahiro Mori first introduced the concept in 1970 from his book titled Bukimi No Tani, lit. 'uncanny valley phenomenon').

Bukimi no tani was translated literally as uncanny valley in the 1978 book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction written by Jasia Reichardt.

Over time, this translation created an unintended association of the concept to Ernst Jentsch's psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny established in his 1906 essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny" which was then critiqued and extended in Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny." 

Mori's original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it becomes almost human, at which point the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. 

However, as the robot's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from that of a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

When plotted on a graph (see above), the reactions are indicated by a steep decrease followed by a steep increase (hence the "valley" part of the name) in the areas where anthropomorphism is closest to reality.

We're going to be reading this book much more slowly than we did the first time.  

We're going to learn a lot about "montage editing."

Montage editing is a powerful technique that condenses time, space, and information by rapidly sequencing short shots, usually set to music. It is a highly versatile storytelling tool used to summarize lengthy training periods, showcase emotional arcs, or establish the tone of a narrative without dragging out the runtime. Think YouTube?

Part One: Film Editing

Chapter 4: Nodality

While reading a book in Italian by Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, Murch realized it would be better read if in free verse! Wow.

Think my own experiences with Mrs Dalloway.

Murch: p; 69 ff.

Explains why free verse makes a difference.

My same experience with Mrs Dalloway. 

A great example of a cut, a classic example of "nodality" is the cut in Lawrence of Arabia from Lawrence blowing out the match to the desert horizon just before the rising of the Sun -- a transition that was intended to be a dissolve in the script.

"We marked a dissolve, but when we watched the footage in the theatre, we saw it as a direct cut. David and I both thought, 'Wow, that's really interesting.' David said, 'That is a fabulous cut. It's not quite perfect -- take it away and make it perfect,' and I literally took two frams off, and that's the way it is today." -- interview with Anne Coates, Washington Post.  Link here.

• Chapter 7 — Saccadic Cinema

• incredibly interesting discussion of what, why, and how our eyes perceive motion;

• some time spent, also, on sound and hearing
• 
Chapter 8 — Tetris I — Timing and Dosing in Editing The Conversation

• the chapter for which I’ve been waiting 

Chapter 12: Standfleisch

"I am inspired by writers who worked standing up, such as Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and Thomas Wolfe. 

Chapter 13: The Spliceosome 

References the biochemist Nick Lane, The Vital Question, 2015, page 184, which I have in my library. I read it some time ago; need to look at it again.

 

Part One: Sound Design

Chapter 17: Francis Coppola's special ballpoint pen.