Walter Murch: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design

Walter Murch​ , the film editor and sound designer Francis Ford Coppola has described as ‘kind of like the film world’s one intellectual’, has what he terms standfleisch. He has spent most of his almost sixty years in the film industry standing his lanky frame in front of various editing consoles. ‘Why do surgeons, orchestra conductors and cooks all stand to do their jobs?’ he asks in Suddenly Something Clicked, a piñata of ideas and anecdotes about his life and work. It sheds light on his forensic craft, his distinctive way of thinking about editing and the making of many of the major films he’s worked on, including Apocalypse Now (1979), the Godfather trilogy (1972-90), The Conversation (1974), American Graffiti (1973) and the 1998 recut of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.

To Murch, who has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for six more, film editing is a sensual ‘full-body’ experience: ‘a kind of dance, a choreography of images and sounds in the flow of time, forged in movement, eventually crystallising into permanence’. This embrace is a kind of erotic surrender to the unique metabolism of each story and its performers, a way of ‘drenching yourself in the sensibility of the film to the point where you’re alive to the smallest details’. ‘To watch Murch at work,’ Michael Ondaatje writes in The Conversations (2002), ‘is to see him delve into almost invisible specifics, where he harnesses and moves the bones or arteries of a scene, relocating them so they will alter the look of the features above the skin.’ The Conversations, a book of interviews with Murch, grew out of his work on the film version of Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient. ‘Most of the work he does is going to affect us subliminally,’ Ondaatje writes. ‘There is no showing off here.’ In the filigree of image and sound there comes a moment when, Murch says, he disappears into the film: ‘The shots, the emotions, the story seem to take over. Sometimes – the best times – this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that – it just created itself.”’

How heavy is this editorial heavy-lifting? Murch, of course, has done the maths. In the tale of the tape, Apocalypse Now is the undisputed champ. A single frame of 35 mm film weighs ‘five-thousandths of an ounce’; a reel of film – eleven minutes of picture and sound – weighs eleven pounds, or a pound a minute. By that calculation, the 1,250,000 feet of film shot by Coppola weighed more than 14,000 pounds or, as Murch puts it, ‘seven tons of film that had to be broken down, boxed, catalogued, put in accessible racks, moved around from editor to editor’. The average ratio of footage shot to footage used in a feature film is 20:1; the ratio for Apocalypse Now was 95:1. Over four years, Murch and his team got the film down from 236 hours to 2 hours and 27 minutes. This is as much bushwhacking as editing, finding the film’s story as well as its grammar, a feat Murch also accomplished for Coppola in The Conversation, which he restructured and essentially rewrote by cutting a third of the scenes.

‘What you do as an editor is search for patterns at both the superficial and ever deeper levels,’ Murch told Ondaatje. His process of excavation is ‘very close’, he says, to the aesthetic strategy of his father, Walter Tandy Murch, a successful still-life painter, whose pictures set realist studies of everyday objects on distressed canvases, giving them the dreamy immanence of abstraction. Before he began a painting, he would introduce an element of chance by stretching canvases for weeks at a time on the uncarpeted hallway of his New York apartment: ‘People would be tramping back and forth … accidents would happen, things would get spilled on them.’ The most interesting sections became the backdrops to his paintings. He called the distress marks ‘hooks’.

The film frame is both Murch’s canvas and his found object. In his editing suite, whether mechanical or digital, he is painting with light and sound, looking for the emotional narrative ‘hook’ between scenes. From two-dimensional fragments he reconstructs a reality which is at once vivid and suggestive. ‘I don’t paint the object,’ his father once told him. ‘I paint the space between my eye and the object.’ Murch uses a similar analogy: ‘If I go out to record a door-slam, I don’t think I’m recording a door-slam. I think I am recording the space in which the door-slam happens.’

His editing obsession began when he was around eleven in the mid-1950s. He convinced his parents to buy him a tape recorder, the expressive possibilities of which struck him with a particular wallop, a ‘kind of delirious drunkenness’: ‘I began by recording random sounds in my local environment, at different speeds, then playing them backwards, upside down, back to front, and chopping the tape into bits and scotch-taping them back together in a different order.’ His hobby, a primitive form of sampling, was given validation when he heard a recording of Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète on the radio. ‘There were adults in the world who took it seriously. I felt like Robinson Crusoe finding Friday’s footprint in the sand.’

At Johns Hopkins University, where his major was art history, Murch collaborated on a few short films and discovered that editing images had the same intoxicating impact as editing sound. ‘You’re oddly at the centre of things but also you are not. You’re the person doing it, yet the feeling is that you’re not the origin of it, that somehow “it” is happening around you, that you are being used by this thing to help bring it into the world.’

After graduating from the University of Southern California film school in 1965, Murch joined renegade forces with his classmate George Lucas, who with Coppola had set up American Zoetrope in San Francisco. They were ‘pretty much trying to reinvent film’, Lucas said, and Murch’s critical acumen was vital to the enterprise. One of the main tasks of the editor, he writes in Suddenly Something Clicked, ‘is to discover/uncover the film’s rhythmic structure’. His thrill is the pursuit of the unknown: ‘In spite of the technical wizardry that surrounds us in the 21st century, working on a film is the closest many of us will ever come to signing on with the crew of a 16th-century galleon, sailing halfway around the world across unmapped seas.’

If Murch is full of wonder at film’s storytelling possibilities, the inventors of the moving picture were not. ‘The cinema is an invention without a future,’ Louis Lumière declared. The cinematograph, which he invented with his brother, Auguste, was a camera that recorded, developed and projected film onto a screen (one of the first being a bedsheet in a Russian brothel). Thomas Edison, though more interested in sound than image, developed the Kinetograph (an early motion-picture camera) and the Kinetoscope, which projected images that could be seen through peepholes. The breakthrough, which turned a 19th-century novelty into the 20th century’s only new art form, was the arrival of montage in 1901. The transition from one shot to another transformed motion pictures from a literal medium into a psychological and poetic one. Movies could now jump back and forth in time and space, ‘the cinematic equivalent to the discovery of flight’, as Murch sees it. Out of its illusion of naturalistic flow – 24 frames a projected second – a new grammar of seeing and of storytelling evolved: close-ups, dissolves, long shots, fade-outs.

‘“Filmic” juxtapositions are taking place in the real world not only when we dream but also when we are awake,’ Murch wrote in his book from 1992, In the Blink of an Eye. This explains why audiences find edited film a surprisingly familiar experience. Every blink is a thought. Every thought is a cut. In support of this belief, Murch quotes John Huston: ‘Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the lamp. Cut. Then you behold me.’ In cinema, Murch says, ‘at the moment you decide to cut, what you are saying is, in effect, “I am going to bring this idea to an end and start something new.”’

The rhythm and rate of cutting should be appropriate to the material the audience is watching. The job of the editor is to anticipate and partly control the thought process of the audience. ‘Think of it as a ball being tossed around the field of the screen,’ Murch writes. It is ‘the job of the subsequent shot to “receive” energy from the previous one and do something creative with it: swing with it, hit it back, dissipate it, freeze it, etc.’ Murch cites as a ‘classic’ example Anne Coates’s direct cut in Lawrence of Arabia (originally intended as a dissolve) when the mise-en-scène jumps from Lawrence blowing out a match to a ravishing desert sunrise. This is the moment that marks Lawrence’s transition from eccentric British officer to legendary figure among the Arabs.

Murch’s sensitivity to rhythm has led him to investigate the anomalies of perception. Why do we see motion in a series of still images? The neurological key, Murch suggests, is the saccade – ‘the jump of the eyeball from one focal point to another’. In each of these instances (three a second, 172,800 on an average day), you are temporarily blind. ‘The moment our eyes start to move in a saccade, the degraded signals coming from the retina are blocked until our eyes come to rest again … consequently, we do not see these blurred images, nor do we see any evidence of their removal.’ Our experience of reality, according to Murch, is of something happening ‘approximately 120 milliseconds (three film frames) after it has happened’.

Murch jostles between metaphysics and neurology in his discussion of film editing, but biology is his link to theorising about sound design. Hearing develops four and a half months after conception. ‘We luxuriate in a continuous bath of sounds: the song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the piping of her intestines, the timpani of her heart,’ he writes. ‘The almost industrial intensity of this womb sound’ is about 75 decibels, ‘equivalent to … the cabin of a cruising passenger jet’. After birth, however, sound is gradually demoted. ‘Whatever virtues sound brings to film are largely perceived and appreciated by the audience in visual terms. The better the sound, the better the image.’ This fusing of sound and image is a sleight of mind in which the brain projects dimensionality onto the screen and makes it seem as if it had come from the image in the first place. ‘We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see/hear/see it.’

By his own admission, the phenomenal success of The Godfather triggered a revival of the metaphorical use of layered sound. Murch’s masterstroke of sound design was the addition – not indicated in the original script – of a rising metallic screech, as if from an overhead train, as Michael Corleone prepares to assassinate Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. ‘The rumbling and piercing metallic scream,’ he writes, ‘is not linked directly to anything seen on screen, and so the audience is made to wonder at least momentarily, if perhaps only subconsciously, “What is this?”’ Because it is detached from the image, the scream becomes a clue to Michael’s state of mind; it comes and goes, then grows louder and louder until he finally pulls out his gun. After he shoots, the sound stops abruptly.

‘Even for the most well-prepared of directors, there are limits to the imagination and memory,’ Murch writes. ‘It is the editor’s job to propose alternative scenarios as bait.’ In Apocalypse Now, the sampan massacre and, more important, the restoration of Captain Willard’s narration to the final script are down to Murch. ‘Willard is an observer – he is our eyes and ears in this diabolical landscape – and for most of the journey, until he gets to the Kurtz compound, he is a mostly silent passenger,’ Murch explains. ‘The audience judges character by comparing words spoken with actions taken, but if there are few words and fewer actions, the character has to emerge from somewhere else: out of an interior, quasi-novelistic voice.’ Following this editorial impulse, Murch dug out Willard’s voiceover from the original screenplay and recorded it himself, ‘lacing it selectively over the first half-hour of film’. His pitch worked. Willard’s voiceover was reinstated (as rewritten by Michael Herr), a crucial adjustment that spoke to the accuracy of Coppola’s dictum that a film director is the ‘ringmaster of a circus that’s inventing itself’.

Suddenly Something Clicked was conceived by Murch as a ‘three-braided rope – theory, practice and history’, a sort of intellectual high-wire act of technical expertise and personal anecdote. Like Murch himself, the book is unique. It’s designed for the reader to play with. Want to read Maxim Gorky’s reaction to seeing his first motion picture? Or see Orson Welles’s lost 58-page memo to the Universal Studios executives who took control of his production of Touch of Evil? Or hear the six pre-mixes and the final mix of the helicopters landing to ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in Apocalypse Now? Or watch an animated restructuring of the scenes in The Conversation? QR codes beside the text provide detours into these subjects and more. Similarly, there are chyrons of adages from other filmmakers and artists – ‘fortunes’, Murch calls them – at the bottom of every even-numbered page, intended as a kind of dialectical chorus to counterpoint or contradict his opinions. His high-spirited advice to film editors holds true for his readers: ‘Good luck! Make discoveries!’