Leitner's Cinematography Corner

“What if Cinema had been invented 100 years earlier?� asks editor extraordinaire Walter Murch.
Photo D.W. Leitner

What if Cinema had been invented 100 years earlier, in 1789 not 1889?

Who would ask such a question?

If you’ve read his ontological discourse on editing, In the Blink of an Eye, or novelist Michael Ondaatje’s book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, you know the answer to the second question. (Ondaatje also wroteThe English Patient.)

Walter Murch is many things: poet-philosopher of the Moviola and lately Final Cut Pro, the guy who coined “sound designer,� recipient of two Oscars for sound mixing and one for editing for the likes of The Conversation, American Graffiti, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (parts II and III), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Ghost, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain.

As a thinking man, a man of reflection, he is also a natural teacher, freely sharing his inspiring insights and intellectual inquiries with students near and far, from alma mater UCLA to the Berlin Film Festival’s Talent Campus for young filmmakers and now Sundance, where on the morning of Day 9—for those lucky enough to have stuck around—he held forth in the meeting room of the Elks’ Lodge on Main Street, part of a Sundance panel series called Cinema Café.

Maxim Gorky wasn’t impressed by the Lumière Brothers in 1896.
Photo D.W. Leitner

His accompanying slide show (quaint term for the endless flow of provocative illustrations emanating from his MacBook Pro and projected on a big screen behind him) began with a 1896 quote from Russian journalist, later dramatist, Maxim Gorky, who upon seeing his first motion picture, a Lumière Brothers production, remarked:

“Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without color. Every thing there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous gray. Gray rays of the sun across the gray sky, gray eyes in gray faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen gray. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless specter.â€?

Murch used Gorky’s complaint to develop a profound point: Cinema required two essential inventions, motion pictures (Edison et. al.) and editing. The forward march of technology—motion, sound, color—would eventually answer Gorky’s sensory deprivation but was, in itself, insufficient to establish Cinema as a narrative art on par with literature or the stage. Editing, invented 14 years after motion pictures—an accident turning off a camera too soon at a horse race in Bristol, England, in 1901, then restarting it led to the discovery of the first cut, per Murch—would provide the tools to shape motion pictures into a dramatic form, but what form would that be?

Murch makes it his mission to share insights and experience with young filmmakers.
Photo D.W. Leitner

At this point in his slide show, Murch introduced the paradox of the Aztec wheel. The Aztecs produced a child’s toy, a dog with wheels, circa 1450, but never made the leap to producing wagons or carts to move burdens or people. According to Murch, the technological underpinnings were there, but Aztec culture wasn’t ready for the concept of the wheel. Similarly, the Greeks had toy steam engines circa 100 BCE.

Murch next turned to early motion pictures and identified three “fathers of Cinema.� Not surprising is his choice of Edison (with W.K.L. Dickson) as father of the mechanical. As father of the cultural, however, Murch named Beethoven, starting in 1803 around the time of the Second Symphony. Beethoven’s contribution to Cinema, Murch explained, was his development of dynamics. Composers before him, Haydn for example, had written compartmentalized sonatas in which the listener is conveyed from movement to movement as if traveling through rooms in a house, each movement a different architectural space.

Beethoven took leave of Baroque formality and architectural order to embrace instead the voluptuousness and violence of nature, from the pastoral solemnity of sunlit forests with twittering birds and soft breezes to sudden volcanic explosions of thundering passion. (Think of Alex’s fierce affection for “Ludwig Van� in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.) His was a highly personal expression of ups and downs, disdain for authority and social rank, charting the emotional and untrammeled. As one French music critic put it in 1810, Beethoven put doves and crocodiles together in the same cage.

The 19th century also produced, in the form of the novel, modern narrative realism. So Murch chose Flaubert as the third father of Cinema, the photographic DNA of which imposes an impression of reality, desired or not. Flaubert’s first novel, Madame Bovary, published in 1857 to great scandal, about a doctor’s wife who embarks on a course of adultery to escape bourgeois banality, was a finely observed, documentary-like description of provincial life, in which pages could be written about a day in which “nothing happened.� (Sound familiar?)

Where do video games fit? Murch thinks playing them combines experiential aspects of all four.
(Click to enlarge.)

So, according to Murch, in the 19th century two rivers, music and the novel, flowed together and by the 1890s had “emptied into the bay of Cinema.� In other words, even though the Zoetrope first appeared around 180 CE in China and again in the 1830s in Britain, motion pictures were destined to remain an Aztec wheel until Beethoven and Flaubert. Western culture wasn’t ready yet.
If Cinema had been invented 100 years earlier, in 1789 not 1889?

Answer: not possible. Culture precedes technology.

Murch had much more to say that day. As a member of a generation who witnessed the eclipse of film technology by electronic capture and editing, his thoughtful charting of the essential differences separating Cinema—which I capitalize, as he does—theater, video, and dreams speaks volumes. It’s worth pondering over time, on your own. (See illustration on right.)

Photo D.W. Leitner

“Cinema is a look into medium,â€? says Murch, whereas “video is a look at medium.â€? What he means is that Cinema is about “entering into the thoughts and emotions of the charactersâ€? compared to television that says “look at me, buy me.â€? These remarks are broad and unfair, as anyone who absorbed culturally acute comedies like Seinfeld or top-shelf HBO dramas like The Sopranos can readily attest. But what he’s talking about is a mind-set, a sensibility, an approach to filmed drama with roots a century long—regardless of display device.

Director David Lean, an editor himself, once remarked that editing is the soul of Cinema. Although a cinematographer, I’m inclined to agree. And after experiencing Walter Murch’s illuminating ideas on a snowy morning in Park City, I think I know who the soul of editing is.