Murch to a Different Drummer

By David Lowery

Two weeks ago, Walter Murch gave the annual State Of Cinema address at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which on paper seemed entirely appropriate. Who better than the preeminent “poet-philosopher of the cinema” (the festival's description of him) to, at least momentarily, rouse us out of the stupor of an art form that's currently all too focused on business?

And personally, it gave me opportunity to reflect on the admiration I, as a filmmaker, hold for Murch, who is best known as the editor of Apocalypse Now, and who has quietly and without ego exerted no small amount of influence upon an entire generation of cinema. He's worked as an editor, most frequently for Coppola and Anthony Minghella, and he's directed one film of his own (the fairly terrifying Return To Oz), but it's his early work as a sound designer on films like The Conversation and THX 1138 that revolutionized not just how films sound today but how those sounds function in concert with the picture. His subtle innovations altered the way in which we, as an audience, perceive motion pictures.

When one speaks of a "filmmaker," it is usually in reference to a director; Murch's career, however, makes a fine case for the inclusion under that title of all the disparate crafstpersons who contribute to this medium. In so much as editing a film or mixing a film involves just as much artistry as directing, Murch is an artist. In so much as his efforts bring a film into the fully realized form its director intended, he is a filmmaker.

He's also something of a scientist. In his two books, In The Blink Of An Eye and The Conversations (which is a series of interviews by Michael Ondaatje), he outlines not simply how he cuts a film, but why. He backs up his creative decisions with historical, psychological and physiological evidence, to the point that creativity is very nearly rendered a tertiary detail in its own process. Almost, but not quite - for if the process of putting a film together could be completely distilled to a system of semantics, there'd be no reason for an editor to engage in the process (and no explanation as to why some of the films Murch has been involved with have fallen flat on their faces).

Even after over a century, there's enough mystery, magic and unpredictability implicit in the science of cinema that one cannot rely on the acuity of theory; indeed, when it comes to making any given cut in any given film, Murch explains in Conversations, he more often than not relies on his gut. He might test his instinct, again and again, to make sure it's correct, but nonetheless: there is a tremendous gulf between what feels right and what is right, and in that inexplicable gray zone lies the difference between a good editor and a bad editor, an artist and a craftsman. I said Murch is something of a scientist, but perhaps it's more accurate to call him an alchemist.

His address in San Francisco the other night was entitled "The Three Fathers Of Cinema," whom he identified as Beethoven, Flaubert and Edison. This reminded me of a particular dilemma I posed some time ago: if a person can be said to be a born filmmaker. what became of all the filmmakers born before the advent of cinema? The answer, it would seem, is that they made their movies in other mediums. This is what we touch on when we call this novel or that symphony "cinematic." Who hasn't listened to Holst's The Planets and thought that it sounds like the soundtrack to a film? We think this because, in a way, it is a film.

This is what Murch was getting at with his three progenitors. Or, at least, the first two: Beethoven, who with his clashing symphonies first defined the magnificent potential of juxtaposition, and Flaubert, who separated narrative from incident and found poetry in the mundane (Edison is no less a visionary in this chronology, but of a more catalytic sort).

Note that Murch does not include photographers or painters or any other visual artist in his round-up, and consider that what defines cinema is not its imagery (its most literal property) but the more kinetic potential, latent in the subjection of that imagery to time, to sound, to everything that is antithetical to the notion of a frozen, autonomous moment. Cinema, as an art, is born out of friction, and Murch, for the past three decades, has been exploring the best ways to push all the right buttons.

This is why I respond to his work, and even moreso to the theories behind it: he has a notion of what cinema is capable of, and he aspires towards it. As evidenced in his texts, he is immensely intelligent and educated. He takes the unknown into consideration. He is curious. He believes in film, and defers to it, it is this that I hold close to my heart, especially when I take off my own director's cap and work as an editor or a cinematographer or some other craftsman laboring towards another filmmaker's vision.

So here is where I must admit: I listened to his speech, and all of the ideas outlined above, and I was not thrilled.

I was intrigued, but not enlightened; interested, but not excited. I didn't want to admit this to myself, nor did I want to write about it here, for fear that this hero of mine might read it. But as I turned my dissatisfaction over in my head, I began to wonder if perhaps Murch was not an ideal candidate for delivering such an address. His ideas served as an extended footnote to the current cinema, rather than the summation that they should have been, and listening to his delivery of them I realized that the one thing he's missing, a trait I've already cited as en absentia, is an ego.

For one can surmise that an ego comes hand in hand with a requisite degree of passion and fervor; it can make a firebrand of a lecturer, and a conflagration of a speech. It contains confidence in one's subject, and an ability to instill that same confidence in others. This is why Murch, great filmmaker though he may be, is not an Auteur, and this is why his deference to his craft does not a galvanizing speech make.

I turn now to Tilda Swinton. She was asked to deliver the State Of Cinema address four years prior, and proffered an oratorical lightening bolt to the film industry - an elegant and moving ode to our cultural and individual need for good, strong and challenging motion pictures. Anyone who heard her found their esteem for her instantly elevated. She was, suddenly, no longer just an actress with good taste but a vessel for the spirit of cinema itself. She was, suddenly, a Filmmaker.

There was a moment when she spoke (spread out, perhaps, over the course of several months and persisting still as new readers discover the text online) in which filmmakers and film lovers alike stood together and held aloft the potential of cinema. In that moment, there were men and women who realized for the first time just how much movies meant to them, and there were boys and girls who suddenly know just how deeply they felt the need to make some of their own. You go back and read Swinton's lecture, written in the form of a letter to her son, and you think: this is why we do this. This is why we go to the movies, and this is why we make them.

Perhaps we don't need hundreds of thousands of newly inspired would-be auteurs clamoring to uphold cinema; perhaps we don't need all the born bankers and born politicians wondering if they might be better off picking up an HD camera. But by the same token, were Tilda Swinton to speak of the three fathers of cinema, nascent filmmakers the world over would be looking away from their Kickstarter campaigns and picking up Madame Bovary.

And then, having read it, they'd turn to Murch, who is precisely the type one would want to stoke this sort of fire.

Walter Murch: "Three Fathers of Cinema" from Old School Cinema on Vimeo.