In the Blink of an Eye is celebrated film editor Walter Murch's vivid, multifaceted, thought -- provoking essay on film editing. Starting with what might be the most basic editing question -- Why do cuts work? -- Murch treats the reader to a wonderful ride through the aesthetics and practical concerns of cutting film. Along the way, he offers his unique insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and reality; criteria for a good cut; the blink of the eye as an emotional cue; digital editing; and much more. In this second edition, Murch reconsiders and completely revises his popular first edition's lengthy meditation on digital editing (which accounts for a third of the book's pages) in light of the technological changes that have taken place in the six years since its publication.

Reel World explores what happens to life when everything begins to look and feel like cinema. Drawing on years of fieldwork with Tamil filmmakers, artists, musicians, and craftsmen in the south Indian movie studios of "Kollywood," Anand Pandian examines how ordinary moments become elements of a cinematic world. With inventive, experimental, and sometimes comical zeal, Pandian pursues the sensory richness of cinematic experience and the adventure of a writing true to these sensations. Thinking with the visceral power of sound and image, his stories also broach deeply philosophical themes such as desire, time, wonder, and imagination. In a spirit devoted to the turbulence and uncertainty of genesis, Reel World brings into focus an ecology of creative process: the many forces, feelings, beings, and things that infuse human endeavors with transformative potential. 

Reel World explores what happens to life when everything begins to look and feel like cinema. Drawing on years of fieldwork with Tamil filmmakers, artists, musicians, and craftsmen in the south Indian movie studios of "Kollywood," Anand Pandian examines how ordinary moments become elements of a cinematic world. With inventive, experimental, and sometimes comical zeal, Pandian pursues the sensory richness of cinematic experience and the adventure of a writing true to these sensations. Thinking with the visceral power of sound and image, his stories also broach deeply philosophical themes such as desire, time, wonder, and imagination. In a spirit devoted to the turbulence and uncertainty of genesis, Reel World brings into focus an ecology of creative process: the many forces, feelings, beings, and things that infuse human endeavors with transformative potential. 

Walter Murch first came across Curzio Malaparte's writings in a chance encounter in a French book about cosmology, where one of Malaparte's stories was retold to illustrate a point about conditions shortly after the creation of the universe. Murch was so taken by the strange, utterly captivating imagery he went to find the book from which the story was taken. The book was Kaputt, Malaparte's autobiographical novel about the frontlines of World War II. Curzio Malaparte, an Italian born with a German heritage, was a journalist, dramatic, novelist and diplomat. When he wrote a book attacking totalitarianism and Hitler's reign, Mussolini, in no position to support such a body of work, stripped him of his National Fascist Party membership and sent him to internal exile on the island of Lipari. In 1941, he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera, the Milano daily newspaper. His dispatches from the next three years would be largely suppressed by the Italian government, but reverberated among readers as painfully real depictions of a landscape at war. The film editor, fluent in translating the written word over to the languages of sight and sound, began slowly translating Malaparte's writings from World War II. The density and intricacy of his stories compelled Murch to adapt many of them into prose or blank verse poems. The result is a book of surprising insight and strange beauty.