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'Observing Walter Murch edit The English Patientwas one of the enlightening experiences of my life.' During the filming of his celebrated novel, Michael Ondaatje became increasingly fascinated as he watched the veteran editor at work. The Conversations, which grew out of discussions between the two men, is about the craft of filmmaking and deals with every aspect of film, from the first stage of script writing to the final stage of the sound mix. Walter Murch emerged during the 1960s at the centre of a renaissance of American filmmakers which included the directors Francis Coppola, George Lucas and Fred Zinneman. He worked on a whole raft of great films including the three Godfatherfilms, Julia, American Graffiti, Apocalypse Nowand The Unbearable Lightness of Beingand many others. Articulate, intellectual, humorous and passionate about his craft and its devices, Murch brings his vast experience and penetrating insights to bear as he explains how films are made, how they work, how they go wrong and how they can be saved. He describes the science of sound as no one else ever has. His experience working on Apocalypse Now, both originally and more recently when the film was completely re-cut, provides a gripping story on its own, while his work with Anthony Minghella on The English Patient, for which Murch won Academy Awards for both sound and picture editing, much of which witnessed by Ondaatje, produces another illuminating highlight of the book.… (altro)
A must-read for anyone even remotely interested in film production. The discussions with Murch, a veteran picture and sound editor, not only provide interesting behind-the-scenes anecdotes about several films (including "Apocalypse Now", "The English Patient" and the "Godfather" trilogy) but shed light on the process of editing -- all the decisions involved when you're given a jumble of footage and have to piece them back together into a coherent, cohesive narrative that may or may not resemble the original screenplay. Even when I disagreed with some of his theories, which is rare, I always appreciated the intelligence and perceptiveness with which he explained them. I'm not familiar with Ondaatje's novels and poetry, but he asks good questions and has some insights of his own regarding the differences between literature and film. ( )
A consistently thought-provoking conversation between two great artists, both undoubtedly in love with the moving image. It uses film editing as a starting point for an original disquisition on the art of film and artistic creativity in general, with many wonderful insights. Movie references abound; this is an undisputed gem of a book that no film-lover should miss. ( )
A wide-ranging discussion between two artists, as much about sound editing as film editing, and how both writing and editing deploy tactics gleaned from psychology or musical forms to establish meaning, pacing, pattern. There are anecdotes from films (from Murch's portfolio and films by others), usually highlighting a specific scene or situation, with correspondingly specific insights into the effect achieved or avoided.
But even with such fascinating discussions from cinema, the book is really about how two interesting individuals think in general. I'm left motivated to follow up on various film studies references, but also novels and historical works mentioned in the course of their dialogues.
Especially incisive is the allegory [210-214] of physicist John Wheeler's parlour game, Negative Twenty Questions, to explain the creative process responsible for wonderfully successful films, as well as failures that prompt the viewer to wonder how anyone, ever could have been persuaded that the idea was worth pursuing. Irreplaceable. Similarly but less developed in their discussion is the idea of cinematic notation, corresponding to musical notation, and how that technique (once developed) could foster innovation and sophistication on the order of polyphony, pattern, harmony in film. Murch suggests [296-301] the I Ching may serve as an interesting foundation for notating the dynamics in a scene, between characters, as expressed in their staging and actions. Provocative but preliminary.
The quotes I focused on tend to be Murch's in this book and he clearly is a polymath mentality. I wonder how much Ondaatje's eclipsed presence is something Ondaatje fashioned deliberately, as the author of the book. ( )
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"Harry, tell him about the time you put the bug in the parakeet." -- The Conversation
"Film editing is a wonderful arcane art, like mosaics. I love to watch it being done, but they of course hate to be watched." -- Donald E. Westlake
Dedica
Incipit
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It is hard for any person who has been on the set of a movie to believe that only one man or woman makes a film.
Citazioni
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[MURCH] As I've gone through life, I've found that you chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old. [9]
[MURCH] When it works, film editing -- which could just as easily be called "film construction" -- identifies and exploits underlying patterns of sound and image that are not obvious on the surface. Putting a film together is, in an ideal sense, the orchestrating of all those patterns, just like different musical themes are orchestrated in a symphony. [10]
[MURCH] There are underlying mathematical influences that determine how a film gets put together, which are amazingly consistent, seemingly independent of the films themselves. Over the years, I've come to rely on these influences -- navigation points -- as I work on each film. For instance: 2.5 -- an audience can process only two and a half thematic elements at any moment; 14 -- a sustained action scene averages out to fourteen new camera positions a minute; 30 -- an assembly should be no more than thirty percent over the ideal running length of the film. But these are perhaps just islands above a larger submerged continent of theory that we have yet to discover. [49]
[MURCH] But when modern musical notation was invented, in the eleventh century, it opened up the underlying mathematics of music, and made that mathematics emotionally accessible. You could easily manipulate the musical structure on parchment and it would produce startlingly sophisticated emotional effects when it was played. And this in turn opened up the concept of polyphony -- multiple musical lines playing at the same time. Then, with the general acceptance of the mathematically determined even-tempered scale in the mid-eighteenth century, music really took off. Complex and emotional changes of key became possible across the tonal spectrum. And that unleased all the music of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Brahms, Mahler!
I like to think cinema is stumbling around in the "pre-notation" phase of its history. We're still doing it all by the seat of our pants. [50-51]
[MURCH] When music makes an entrance in a film there's the emotional equivalent of a cutaway. Music functions as an emulsifier that allows you to dissolve a certain emotion and take it in a certain direction. When there's no music, the filmmakers are standing back saying, simply, Look at this. Without appearing to comment. [103]
[MURCH] There was a huge dialectical influence, from Kant to Hegel and Marx, and then Eisenstein and others found a way to show Marxian dialectics -- opposition and synthesis -- in cinema. In the Soviet Union, cinema was seen to be the art that most clearly showed the superiority of Marxian dialectics in its very essence. The Communists naturally pushed that aspect of it, the editing, very hard.
We who are not Marxian always worked with those elements but didn't push them so hard. [108]
[MURCH] It's a classic example for me of the correct use of music, which is as a collector and channeler of previously created emotion, rather than the device that creates the emotion. Music in The Godfather is almost always used in this way. I think in the long run this approach generates emotions that are truer because they come out of your direct contact with the scene itself, and your own feelings about the scene -- not feelings dictated by a certain kind of music. The Godfather is a good film to study for its use of music. [122]
[MURCH] We look at ancient Egyptian painting today and may find 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 most characteristic aspect. The face is in profile because that reveals the most about 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, but the feet are. It gives a strange, tiwsted effect, but it was natural to the Egyptians. They were painting essences, and in order to pain an essence you have to paint it from its most characteristic angle.
That's exactly what we do in film, except that instead of the body of the person, it's the work itself. The director chooses the most characteristic, revealing, interesting angle for every situation and every line of dialogue and every scene. He then overshoots the material and gives the editor an additional range of choices. W're doing the same kind of shifting between angles. It may be, five hundred years from now, when people see films from our era, they'll seem "Egyptian" in a strange way. [199]
Ultime parole
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The dreams become impatient with me. They're waiting to come in, and they can't, because something else -- the film -- is occupying that space. Only when that space is empty can they come in. And they come in to redress the situation. They are, it seems, relentlessly temporal .... [310]
'Observing Walter Murch edit The English Patientwas one of the enlightening experiences of my life.' During the filming of his celebrated novel, Michael Ondaatje became increasingly fascinated as he watched the veteran editor at work. The Conversations, which grew out of discussions between the two men, is about the craft of filmmaking and deals with every aspect of film, from the first stage of script writing to the final stage of the sound mix. Walter Murch emerged during the 1960s at the centre of a renaissance of American filmmakers which included the directors Francis Coppola, George Lucas and Fred Zinneman. He worked on a whole raft of great films including the three Godfatherfilms, Julia, American Graffiti, Apocalypse Nowand The Unbearable Lightness of Beingand many others. Articulate, intellectual, humorous and passionate about his craft and its devices, Murch brings his vast experience and penetrating insights to bear as he explains how films are made, how they work, how they go wrong and how they can be saved. He describes the science of sound as no one else ever has. His experience working on Apocalypse Now, both originally and more recently when the film was completely re-cut, provides a gripping story on its own, while his work with Anthony Minghella on The English Patient, for which Murch won Academy Awards for both sound and picture editing, much of which witnessed by Ondaatje, produces another illuminating highlight of the book.
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