The Conversations Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film First Conversation

Walter Murch is one of the most respected film editors and audio designers, ane of New Hollywod'south central figures, having worked with Francis Ford Coppola in, for instance The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) and George Lucas in THX 1138   (1971) and American Graffiti  (1973), in addition to having taken office 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 series 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 Fine art of Editing Picture show. In information technology, Murch comments some of the scenes in certain films that he worked, and shows an enviable knowledge of painting, music, among other arts and the intellectual parallels that tin can be found in cinema.

Excerpts:

"Murch: (...) in the first Godfather, when Michael is proverb good-bye to Kay. She's proverb, "Maybe I could come up with you." He replies, "No, Kay, it's family, at that place will be detectives, yous just can't." And suddenly the framing has shifted, suggesting that something is wrong. Fifty-fifty though he's nonetheless facing her, and beingness nice to her, the framing says the opposite. He's being pulled by something behind him, something that is going to take him away from her. It'due south like shooting fish in a barrel for him, in this new limerick, to motility away from her, into the empty space that'southward on the right side of the frame…."

"Ondaatje: The matter is, the construction in a volume allows the reader a more meditative participation than movie. Considering nosotros are non leap by time. The experience of a book is not finite. The reader can "investigate" the given story and look back and pause and authorize the material. But I suspect you lot see the viewer of a flick participating in a different way?

Murch: In moving picture, there'south a trip the light fantastic betwixt the words and images and the sounds. As rich equally films appear, they are limited to two of the five senses —hearing and sight—and they are limited in time—the film lasts just as long every bit information technology takes to project it. It's not like a volume. If you don't understand a paragraph in a book, you can read it again, at your own footstep. With a moving-picture show, you have to consume it in ane go, at a prepare speed."

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

That's exactly what we do in motion-picture show, except that instead of the torso of the person, it's the work itself. The manager chooses the almost characteristic, revealing, interesting angle for every situation and every line of dialogue and every scene. He so 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