[과제] Response to excerpts by Walter Murch and Claire Atherton

Readings: Excerpts from Living Matter, by Claire Atherton, and In the Blink of an Eye, by Walter Murch

 

As someone whose default mode of life is to intellectualize everything that goes on around me, I have always secretly admired those unlike me, those who seemed to be “living in the moment,” so to say. I’d always felt somehow locked up in the small space inside my skull, at all times applying a sort of cerebral filter to any raw sensation that was coming in from the outside. What would it be like, instead, to be present in the moment, to directly access and respond to my surroundings and my desires, to lead a sensual rather than theoretical life—to be able to really “seize the day”?

 

To this regard, I must admit that I was enthralled by Claire Atherton’s essay on her approach to film editing. I took the crux of Atherton’s essay to be that the process of filmmaking cannot be reduced to its intentional and cognitive features; there is an emotional spontaneity in the raw material that must be respected in the process of weaving the parts into a whole. Her emphasis on the Chinese concept of “emptiness”—ridding oneself of any preconceived intention and moving away from trying to control everything—is exactly the polar opposite of a meticulously constructed, strictly analytic approach to filmmaking, as well as of the speculative attitude towards life in general. It is about being true to the sensational experience before us; it is about being a realist with regards to our firsthand experience. The primacy of emotion is, in fact, the lesson from the other reading by Walter Murch as well, who, in laying out the principles of film editing, places emotion above all other technical considerations.

 

Of course, at this point, after reading just those few pages, it would be presumptuous to say that I have even a slight grasp of how to make films that genuinely convey and deliver emotion. Hopefully the know-how will gradually come to me as I actually engage with the editing process. Anyhow, for the moment, I am excited to try out this approach to filmmaking removed of needless cognizing, where impulses, experiments and the raw “feels” roam free.