Walter Murch has played a key role in many of the most celebrated movies of the past 30 years, including two \Godfather"" movies, ""The English Patient"" and ""Apocalypse Now,"" and is considered the very best in his field.
So why does no one know who he is?
Simply put, Murch lacks a high-profile position. He is a film editor, and the intricacies of this craft escape even the canniest of film-goers. Knowing the substantial input the editor makes, Michael Ondaatje, author of five novels including ""The English Patient,"" takes issue with this, and seeks to remedy it with ""The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film.""
The tactic Ondaatje takes to go about this, as the book title implies, is transcribing a series of extensive conversations about the role of the editor in film between himself and Murch. The two men are good friends, having met while Murch edited ""The English Patient,"" and the conversations move along quickly and charmingly. Despite this, much of the talk appears to have been heavily edited after it occurred. Reasonably fitting, given the subject of the book, but it comes off as slightly strange when reading, especially when the conversation veers into lengthy quotations or when somebody talks in parentheses. This fact remains in the back of the reader's mind throughout the entire book, never allowing the intimacy that Ondaatje strives for.
But while the approach is mildly off-putting, the contents of the discussion often prove fascinating. The overarching theme, of course, is the impact the editor wields on a film, but the book dabbles in many other topics along the way.
Along the way, Murch's various accomplishments provide touchstones for the conversation. In fact, the book's title itself is a reference to one of the more overlooked films of the '70s, ""The Conversation,"" which Murch also worked on. The two men's discussion of this film proves absorbing, as does their dialogue on Murch's restoration of Orson Welles' classic ""Touch of Evil"" from the legendary director's original notes. Among Murch's ideas that prove interesting is his tendency to end a scene on the blink of an actor's eye, thus making the cut seem more natural. This kind of insight into the moviemaking process often goes unexamined by the audience, and opens up a new perspective on film.
Murch is a man of many ideas'his theory on the relation of the I-Ching to film, for example'and this book lays them out nicely, transcending the mundane technical discussion it could have devolved into. At one point Murch says, ""Films, when they work, are functioning at a complex level of harmonic interaction'of sounds and images and acting and costume and art and on and on."" With this book, Murch emerges from this harmony to explain what he does, and the reader obtains an immense amount of insight into the creative process.
