Reading your mind with film
A well edited film works by anticipating your curiosity. Just when you start to wonder, “What happened with Han Solo?” the film cuts from Degobah to the Millennium Falcon. The same mechanism works even within a scene. One character starts to say something shocking. Just as you wonder how the other character takes it, they cut to a close up of that character’s face. It is almost as if the film is wired to the movement of your eyes - flicking between characters as your eyes move around.
I think I first noticed this when I was a kid, glued to this marvelous new invention called HBO. I clumsily tried to describe it in my Still vs Video posts. It’s the following quote from John Houston that really crystallized the idea for me:
“To me, the perfect film is as though it were unwinding behind your eyes, and your eyes were projecting it themselves, so that you were seeing what you wished to see. Film is like thought. It’s the closest to thought process of any art.” (found on p. 60 Walter Murch’s, In the Blink of an Eye)
Thinking about this quote, I realized that I use a similar approach in my writing. My fiction writing style is spartan, as you can see in Natiki. I’ve never been comfortable writing flowery prose detailing every last scratch on the furniture or meditating on each shade of color. Most human beings don’t take in that much detail when they walk into the room. People tend to notice the details only when something draws their attention. I like to write fiction similarly - supplying details a little at a time as you’d notice them while invisibly following the protagonist around. If I do my job well, you don’t notice. The writing follows your thoughts just as in film.
(BTW: Walter Murch’s book goes into this mechanism in detail. It’s a fascinating read if you are interested in editing or just love movies).
