THE BACKLOT
Within the movie industry, Walter Murch is one of the
most respected individuals in the
business. He is a talented and
educated man who has not only edited a number of feature films over the
years, but he is considered the inventor of sound design. His imprint on
the art of film editing is impeccable. His mastering of sound is studied
by many who want to get into sound design, as well as by those who
currently work in that field.
As an editor, Murch's credits range from a number of Francis Ford
Coppola films like "The Godfather, Part II" (1974) to Anthony
Minghella’s "Cold Mountain" (2003). As a sound designer, a term he
coined, his work can be heard on "American Graffiti" (1973) and "The
English Patient" (1996), for which he won two Oscars; one for editing
and one for sound.
Murch is a lecturer, a teacher and a theorist. Much of his insight into
art, literature and classical music is fascinating to listen to. Author
Michael Ondaatje’s recent book, "The Conversations: Walter Murch and Art
of Editing Film" (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002) goes into depth with
Murch on many of his theories, film work and his life. One of the
highlights of reading about a great artist is you can see the theory
behind the work and even answers to practical questions about financing,
like applying to
Flagship Merchant Services for help equipping yourself if sound
design is a dream of yours as well.
One of Murch’s most interesting theories on film revolves around his
three fathers of film. I was fortunate to have him describe this theory,
as well as his work on restoring the first sound film, "The
Edison/Dickson Experiment."
William Kallay, From Script To DVD: Can you describe
your concept of the three fathers of film?
Walter Murch: It’s an attempt to answer a tantalizing
question: why did film develop as a storytelling medium so quickly after
its invention? It seems natural to us today, but there were many people
a century ago, including even the
inventors of film - Edison and the
Lumière brothers - who did not foresee this development. Lumière went so
far as to say that cinema was "an invention without a future." And he
could have been right: there are frequently Inventions Without a Future
- inventions which are ahead of their time, or outside their appropriate
culture: the Aztecs invented the wheel, but didn’t know how to use it
except as a toy. The Greeks did the same with the steam engine. So you
have to look not only at the invention itself, but the social and
cultural context which surrounds it. They all have to mesh, and with
film they meshed spectacularly well. Within twelve years of its
invention, film grammar is being determined in "The Great Train Robbery"
the cut, the closeup, parallel action - along with the social and
economic structures that would integrate cinema into the pattern of
people’s daily lives and make the whole thing pay for itself. Within
another dozen years, the feature film as we know it today was almost
completely fleshed out, thanks to
D.W. Griffith and "Birth Of A Nation."
And then synchronous sound was added twelve years later to virtually
complete the equation.
What would have happened, on the other hand, if somehow film had been
invented in 1787 rather than 1887? Would we (at the time of the American
Revolution) have known what to do with it? Or would this imaginary 18th
Century Cinema have remained a kind of "Aztec Wheel" whose inherent
potential would not be realized for a hundred years? I rather
suspect the latter, because there were cultural movements that matured
in the 19th century the idea of realism (from literature and
painting), and dynamics (from music) - which are actually as much a part
of cinema as the technical nature of film itself. And in 1787, realism
and dynamics had not yet been born. And for film to be Cinema, you need
three things: film, realism, and dynamics. This is where the idea of the
Three Fathers comes in: Edison, Flaubert, and Beethoven. Edison (let’s
use him as shorthand to stand for all the technical geniuses of early
film) invented the physical side of film: its mechanical, chemical
nature. But fifty years earlier, writers like Flaubert (let’s use him in
the same shorthand way) invented the idea of realism that by
meticulously observing ordinary reality, and writing these observations
in a certain way, you can extract a transcendent meaning from that
ordinary reality. And thirty years before Flaubert, composers like
Beethoven (same shorthand) invented the idea of dynamics that by
aggressively expanding, contracting and transforming the rhythmic and
orchestral structure of music you can thereby extract great emotional
resonance and power.
Now I’m not saying that there was a total absence of realism or dynamism
in works of art before 1800. That’s certainly not the case. But the 19th
century intensely focused and greatly expanded these concepts, and made
them central to the novel, to the symphony, to painting. As usual with
revolutionary ideas, they were not easily accepted at first. Realism
seemed to some readers too ordinary to be literature: if the writer was
just describing what the reader could see with his own eyes, why write
at all!? When Manet exhibited his painting of Olympia, there was an
outcry because she was just an ordinary girl, not a mythical creature.
Mythical creatures could be painted in the nude, but not ordinary girls
who you could see walking down the street. And when composer Carl Maria
von Weber heard Beethoven’s Seventh symphony (1813), he felt that
"Beethoven is quite ripe for the madhouse." Beethoven’s music (compared
to say, Haydn’s or Mozart’s) seemed to jump maniacally from one topic to
another, to abandon thematic ideas and pick them up later, turned inside
out. His music didn’t stick to the previous century’s more ordered
architectural model of composition - it substituted an organic, wild,
natural (sometimes supernatural) model that was exhilarating to the
young people who heard it and rather frightening to the older folks. "He
takes at times the flight of an eagle, and then creeps in rocky
pathways. He first fills the soul with sweet melancholy, and then
shatters it with a mass of barbarous chords. He puts doves and
crocodiles together in the same cage," wrote a French music critic in
1810. When you listen to Beethoven’s music now, and hear those sudden
shifts in tonality, rhythm, and musical focus, it is as if you can hear
the grammar of film cuts, dissolves, fades, superimposures, long
shots, close shots being worked out in musical terms. By the end of
the 19th century these once-revolutionary ideas of realism and dynamism
had been thoroughly accepted into European culture: generations of
artists, writers, and composers as well as society at large had by
1887 completely (and somewhat unconsciously) internalized these ways of
looking, thinking, listening. The whole 19th century was steeped in
realism and dynamism. And then along came Film: a medium ideally suited
to the dynamic representation of closely observed reality. And so these
two great rivers of 19th century culture realism (from literature and
painting) and dynamism (from music) surged together within the
physical framework of film to crystallize, within a few decades, the new
artistic form of cinema.
FSTDVD: Do you mind telling our readers about your
involvement in the work-in-progress on the Dickson/Edison sound
recording?
Murch: This was a real detective story involving a
forgotten, broken sound cylinder at Thomas Edison’s lab in Menlo Park
[New Jersey]. Patrick Loughney, the head of television and film at the
Library of Congress, developed an intuition that this cylinder might
actually be the soundtrack for a short kinetoscope that Edison made in
1894. The film is of one of Edison’s key assistants William Dickson
playing a violin into a recording horn: it’s clear from looking at the
image that the violin must have been being recorded (on a cylinder) as
they were filming. But the accompanying sound had never been located.
Until a few years ago, when Patrick located this particular broken
cylinder and had it repaired. In fact, it turned out to be a recording
of someone playing the violin. But the Library of Congress had no means
to put the image and the sound in sync: the film was shot at 40 frames a
second (rather than our standard today of 24) and only lasted 17
seconds: whereas the sound on the cylinder was two and half minutes
long. So the question was: which 17 seconds of sound went with the film?
And then, once you’ve decided that, how do you put it in sync with the
film, which is playing at a non-standard frame rate?
FSTDVD: Quite a restoration dilemma. How did you get in
touch with Mr. Loughney?
Murch: I was put in touch with Patrick through Rick
Schmidlin, who had produced the restoration of "Touch Of Evil," and
Patrick asked if I could help them. I wound up digitizing both the sound
and the picture, and was consequently able to render the film at normal
speed and then find various sync points with the music. I tried dozens
and dozens over a period of a couple of hours until I finally found the
one that worked the soundtrack and the picture were finally in sync with
each other for the first time in a 106 years!
FSTDVD: Is this the first known recording of film with
sound?
Murch: Yes. It pushes the threshold of film sound back
by a couple of decades. There’s anecdotal evidence of something done a
couple of years earlier, in 1891, but neither the film nor the image for
that have turned up yet.
FSTDVD: I’ve read somewhere that it was actually
Dickson who really did most of the work on the sound elements.
Murch: Well, not only that: Dickson was the man who
invented motion pictures as we know them: the use of celluloid, the 35mm
width, the size of the image, the sprocket wheel, the four sprockets to
each frame, and so on.
FSTDVD: Edison gets a lot of credit for the development
of film.
Murch: Well, he should: Dickson was an employee of the
Edison research laboratory, after all. There were many, many things,
invented there over the years, including film. Edison obviously had a
controlling hand in it, but it was Dickson who actually did the detailed
work. And as I mentioned, Dickson is the man playing violin in that
test. So now you can see (and hear) the man who invented film, appearing
in the first sound film ever made!
Special thanks to Walter Murch
Photos courtesy of Walter Murch and
www.filmsound.org
Originally posted here on September 27, 2004