Sight and Sound: The Cinema of Water Murch

Murch Ado About...

I've written a bit about Walter Murch—editor, sound-designer, writer, author, philosopher—specifically in the area of sound design (or "audio montage" as Murch coined it), where his work was industry-changing, moving away from recycled sound libraries (for example, that "ubiquitous" jangling "Universal" telephone ring!), and creating specific sound-scapes for the picture and tailoring them for the environment, be it physical or emotional. When it works, it becomes a singular emotional experience, wrapping an audience member into a cocoon of individual reactions and interpretations, getting under their skin and firing neurons in quite unexpected ways—making what McLuhan called a hot medium and cooling it off. When it's done wrong, the experience is that of a wall of sound and creating an expectation that every little detail in a scene must be given its aural due. 

Analog Murch super-imposed over digital Murch

Murch has done all sorts of interviews about sound editing and picture editing, and being a particularly curious individual has tried to convey the processes and the philosophies behind them in books, articles, video's and speaking engagements, sometimes a mix of the media. And these are all readily available with a simple browser search utilizing "All", "News", "Images" or "Video."

He had me at The Star-Child: Lefkovitz begins with an image from 2001

Documentary-composer-editor Jon Lefkovitz has done all that searching for you and made a broad overview entitled Sight and Sound: the Art of Walter Murch, which does the exact opposite of Murch's job, starting with a through-line narration made of Murch talking points and concepts and does an interpretive picture match illustrating those concepts—those sequences being from Murch's work when he could, but also from a broad swath of films that Murch had nothing to do with, but still manage to hit the point that is being made in the shortest time possible.

"Should I be doing this?": Murch edits a scene in Jarhead featuring a sequence he edited in Apocalypse Now.

Murch worked with Francis Coppola—still does, in fact—George Lucas (in pre-Star Wars days), Anthony Minghella, Philip Kaufman, Fred Zinnemann, Sam Mendes, Jerry Zucker and Katheryn Bigelow, and directed a film of his own, the culture-smashing film of Return to Oz (which we'll look at next week), his first encounter with the Disney Company (which he seems to have bad luck with), and the films all presented different challenges—some brought acclaim, some languished at the box-office—and despite Murch's legendary status, he can still get fired (he was on Tomorrowland) 

One could go on...but there are links and you can look up past posts. The film itself is a fast view, probably 80 minutes as the credits are vast. And it's a nice little tutorial the power and potential of the film medium, and nice skimming of Murch's career.

"Sometimes you have to kill the chicken to save the monkey..."