The Conversations Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

Walter Murch is one of the most respected film editors and sound designers, i of New Hollywod'southward central figures, having worked with Francis Ford Coppola in, for example The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) and George Lucas in THX 1138   (1971) and American Graffiti  (1973), in addition to having taken role in the restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil  from the notes that he had sent to Universal. He also edited The English Patient (1996) an accommodation of Michael Ondaatje's famous novel. During several years, Murch and Ondaatje reunited for a serial of interviews in which both discussed their crafts and the similarities they observed in editing and literature. Those interviews were collected in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. In it, Murch comments some of the scenes in certain films that he worked, and shows an enviable noesis of painting, music, amidst other arts and the intellectual parallels that can be found in cinema.

Excerpts:

"Murch: (...) in the start Godfather, when Michael is proverb good-bye to Kay. She'southward saying, "Maybe I could come with you lot." He replies, "No, Kay, it'due south family unit, there volition exist detectives, you lot just can't." And all of a sudden the framing has shifted, suggesting that something is wrong. Even though he's however facing her, and being nice to her, the framing says the reverse. He'southward being pulled by something behind him, something that is going to take him away from her. It's easy for him, in this new limerick, to move away from her, into the empty infinite that's on the right side of the frame…."

"Ondaatje: The matter is, the structure in a volume allows the reader a more meditative participation than pic. Because nosotros are not jump by time. The experience of a book is not finite. The reader tin can "investigate" the given story and expect back and break and qualify the textile. But I suspect yous see the viewer of a picture participating in a different fashion?

Murch: In picture, there'southward a dance betwixt the words and images and the sounds. Equally rich as films announced, they are express to two of the five senses —hearing and sight—and they are limited in time—the moving picture lasts only as long as it takes to projection it. It'southward not like a book. If you don't understand a paragraph in a book, you can read it once more, at your own step. With a film, yous accept to consume information technology in ane go, at a set speed."

"Murch: We look at ancient Egyptian painting today and may detect it slightly comic, simply what the Egyptians were trying to do with the figure was reveal the various aspects of the person's body in the near characteristic aspect. The confront is in profile because that reveals the about most the person's face, but the shoulders are not in profile, they're facing the viewer, considering that'south the most revealing angle for the shoulders. The hips are not in profile, but the feet are. It gives a strange, twisted effect, but information technology was natural to the Egyptians. They were painting essences, and in order to pigment an essence you have to pigment information technology from its near feature bending. So they would but combine the diverse feature essences of the homo body. This was a piece of spiritual fine art. It wasn't trying to reproduce photographic reality, it was trying to reproduce and combine all the essential features of a person inside one effigy.

That's exactly what we do in moving-picture show, except that instead of the body of the person, it'due south the work itself. The director chooses the about characteristic, revealing, interesting angle for every state of affairs and every line of dialogue and every scene. He then overshoots that material and gives the editor an additional range of choices."

Link to the complete book in PDF:

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Source: https://booksoncinema.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-conversations-walter-murch-and-art.html