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

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

 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.