But if a film can provoke the audience’s participation–if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work How each moment gets completed depends on each individual person. So the film, although it’s materially the same series of images and sounds, should, ideally, provoke slightly different reactions from each person who sees it.

Even though it’s a mass medium, it’s those individual reactions that make each person feel the film is speaking to him or her. The fantastic thing about the process is that they actually see their own version on the screen. They would swear they saw it, but in fact it wasn’t there. Enough was there so that they completed it in their own way, but as it’s happening they don’t stop to think: That’s just me completing it. They really see something that appears as authentic to them as anything else that’s actually physically in the film

How does this happen? It can only be because the film is ambiguous in the right places and draws something out of you that comes from your own experience. And then you see it on screen and think: Only I know that, so the film must be made for me.

– Walter Murch, The Conversations

As part of summer reading catch-up, I’ve been meandering through the conversations between Michael Ondaatje and Walter Murch about film editing. As much of my time lately has been preparation for ethnographic research on tabletop role playing games, I am struck by Murch’s sense of empowerment for viewers. The agency of the audience within his films is one that is personalized. It negotiates the relationship between storyteller and story-receiver in such a way that both feel emboldened in nuanced interpretations.

A blog post will follow about the quasi-brilliant marginalia in this used copy of the book I have and the erratic bouncing ball of ’80s sing-a-longs that makes cameos by its previous owner.