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pedantic nuthatch
Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.

Friday, 26 September 2003

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje

This book is an enlightening, quotable series of interviews between Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, and Walter Murch, film editor and re-recording mixer for the film adaptation of the book. It's not so much a comprehensive theory-and-practice of film and sound editing—one suspects that Murch works too intuitively for that—as it is a collection of war stories by one of the unsung masters of American film in the last thirty years.

Murch was a part of George Lucas's early THX 1138; performed the sound and film edit for the restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil; and in the span of seven years, edited film and/or sound for American Graffiti, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and the first two Godfather pictures.

There is much of the paradox in Murch. On the one hand, there is an imperiousness, and an unwillingness to be influenced by others' work:

It's very difficult for me to see films when I'm working. I get too easily depressed. If they're bad, I begin to despair for filmmaking in general. It seems proof that it's impossible to make a film. You're always plagued by the question: Can we do this? So to watch a film that doesn't work is dispiriting, in a large sense.
Yet, like Francis Ford Coppola, he is an eager collaborator, both with other craftsmen and with the reader/viewer. He refers to a parlor game invented by the physicist John Wheeler, Negative Twenty Questions, to describe how a film is put together and ultimately succeeds or fails. In brief, each creator begins with his or her own vision of the completed film. As pieces are built—the script is written, the cast is assembled, the film is shot—each subsequent creator must deal with the contradictions between the vision and the built movie, make a creative contribution to the whole that resolves those contradictions, and thus the film moves on to completion.

The participation of the film's viewer or book's reader is also important:

The richest zone of communication is the grey area... where the reader is somewhat receptive to what the author writes but also brings along his own images, and ideas, which is a creative way to do violence to the author's vision and ideas.
The book doesn't work quite as well as it should. It seems that Ondaatje intended the exchanges to be a bit more two-way, but it's mainly Murch who has the insights. Perhaps this is because The English Patient is the only film they have deeply in common, and Ondaatje is clearly familiar with the rest of Murch's work. And like any series of talks, the discourse doubles back on itself from time to time, and wanders down blind alleys. (Murch's analysis of scenes by use of the I Ching's hexagrams is a case in point.)

But it's refreshingly startling to hear Murch compare George Lucas to Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Lloyd Wright (for his auteuristic control of the creative process, in opposition to Coppola) or to read about Lucas's early career:

Star Wars is George's transubstantiated version of Apocalypse Now.
Well illustrated with stills and interlaced with sidebars from the likes of director Anthony Minghella, this book will tickle most film buffs.

posted: 9:37:28 AM  




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