In Michael Ondaatje’s book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, the editor and sound designer of many Francis Ford Coppola films emerges as a true innovator and a boundlessly creative manipulator of the basic elements of film: image and sound. Murch is also uncommonly self-reflexive and shows a deep understanding for the perceptual effects that his work has on an audience. Through his art and his craft, he places viewers in the heart of battle in Apocalypse Now or firmly inside the minds of characters like Michael Corleone and Harry Caul. But Murch isn’t content with simply presenting concepts and techniques, fully-formed, to the audience. Instead, he lobbies for the creative input of everyone involved in the process of making a film, a process, Murch believes, that ends not with the final mix of a film, but with its eventual interaction with an audience. Through the course of his conversations with Ondaatje, Murch argues that the great films always leave the hardest work to the audience, the task of synthesis, of perceiving new worlds, magically emerging from nothing more than a collection of discrete sounds and images. Read more…
Film Capsule 