Toward a Theory of Reel Time

Jean-Luc Godard said to me, “You have to be young and foolish to make a film. If you know as much as we do, it is impossible.” We were watching a first-time director blissfully pursuing his vision, protected from the complexities of the process by his delirious ignorance. Each time he was on the edge of disaster, the cameraman, the assistant director, the actors stepped in and caught him just before he fell. Later, he was lucky to find a good editor to help him shape these accidents and inspirations. Had he been very lucky, indeed, he might have got Walter Murch.

Starting out as the guru of the soundtrack, Murch has become one of the great film editors. He is a perfect foil for Francis Ford Coppola, who, while a consummate filmmaker, has always retained his belief in the primacy of chance and never lost his affection for chaos. Murch, while protecting the creativity, will find a mathematical structure to contain it. He compares the Coppola and the Alfred Hitchcock methods:

“It has to be said--both systems have their risks. The risk of the Hitchcockian system is that you may stifle the creative force of the people who are collaborating with you. The film that results--even if it’s a perfect vision of what somebody had in his head--can be lifeless: It seems to exist on its own, without the necessary collaboration either of the people who made the film or even, ultimately, the audience. It says: I am what I am whether you like it or not. On the other hand, the risk with the process-driven film is that it can collapse into chaos. Somehow the central organizing vision can be so eaten away and compromised by all the various contributors that it collapses under its own weight.”

I advise young filmmakers that the ideal is to carefully plan and pursue your vision but be open to the moments of inspired chance that can be contained within it. Very difficult. Akira Kurosawa describes how his films became more and more formally defined, shooting only exactly the shots he needed. This method makes for great intensity and concentration. The cast and crew know that every time the camera turns, the shot will be in the movie. In the cutting room he often found he needed to shorten a scene or wished he had a close-up for emphasis. However, he feared that to shoot extra shots of this and that, just in case, would compromise his method. His solution was to employ a second cameraman to shoot something on every scene on his own initiative. Kurosawa never printed his material unless he got into trouble in the editing. Then he would take a look. In this way he combined formality with the random.

The poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje, a man steeped in film history, became absorbed by Murch’s views and methods during the making of his acclaimed book “The English Patient.” “The Conversations” is made up of a series of conversations they conducted over a long period of time.

Ondaatje writes of Murch: “He is a true oddity in the world of film. A genuine Renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with filmmaking.... He has worked on the sound and/or picture editing of such films as ‘American Graffiti,’ ‘The Conversation,’ ‘The Godfather’ (Parts I, II and III), ‘Julia,’ ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ ‘Ghost’ and ‘The English Patient.’ Four years ago he recut ‘Touch of Evil,’ following Orson Welles’s ignored fifty-eight page memo to Universal. He has written ‘In the Blink of an Eye,’ a sort of ‘Zen and the Art of Editing,’ as pertinent for writers and readers as it is for filmmakers and audiences. But he is a man who also lives outside the world of film, the son of an artist whose theories and attitudes on art have deeply influenced him. He can sit at the piano and play ‘the music of the spheres,’ based on the distance of the planets from one another, translated by him into musical chords. And in recent years he has been translating the [Italian prose] writings of Curzio Malaparte into [English poetry] ... as well as campaigning to revive the discredited theories of the 18th century astronomer Johannes Bode.”

At first sight he seems absurdly overqualified for a job that is generally considered to be a combination of the mechanical and the intuitive. I have often written about the film process and described it as a language that everyone can understand but that is fiendishly difficult to speak. Whether in scripting, shooting or editing, we fumble and feel our way in a morass of trial and error, inspiration and correction. Our only guide--the rule of thumb. In moments of epiphany many filmmakers experience the insight that cinema will evolve into something we cannot yet imagine. We catch a glimpse of it when occasionally we achieve those rare heart-leaping cinematic moments when the elements transcend themselves into something ineffable. “The English Patient” achieved more than its share of those. Walter Murch has been developing a theory of what this future thing could be.

“I think cinema is perhaps now where music was before musical notation--writing music as a sequence of marks on paper--was invented. Music had been a crucial part of human culture for thousands of years, but there had been no way to write it down. Its perpetuation depended on an oral culture, the way literature’s did in Homeric days. But when modern musical notation was invented, in the eleventh century, it opened up the underlying mathematics of music, and made that mathematics emotionally accessible. You could easily manipulate the musical structure on parchment and it would produce startlingly sophisticated emotional effects when it was played. And this in turn opened up the concept of polyphony--multiple musical lines playing at the same time. Then, with the general acceptance of the mathematically determined even-tempered scale in the mid-eighteenth century, music really took off. Complex and emotional changes of key became possible across the tonal spectrum. And that unleashed all the music of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Brahms, Mahler!

“I like to think cinema is stumbling around in the ‘pre-notation’ phase of its history. We’re still doing it all by the seat of our pants. Not that we haven’t made wonderful things. But if you compare music in the twelfth century with music in the eighteenth century, you can clearly sense a difference of several orders of magnitude in technical and emotional development, and this was all made possible by the ability to write music on paper. Whether we will ever be able to write anything like cinematic notation, I don’t know. But it’s interesting to think about.”

This is not just idle speculation. He has been working toward it:

“There are underlying mathematical influences that determine how a film gets put together, which are amazingly consistent, seemingly independent of the films themselves. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on these influences--navigation points--as I work on each film. For instance: 2.5--an audience can process only two and a half thematic elements at any moment; 14--a sustained action scene averages out to fourteen new camera positions a minute; 30--an assembly should be no more than thirty percent over the ideal running length of the film. But these are perhaps just islands above a larger submerged continent of theory that we have yet to discover.”

He also has his own theory of the origins of film. He claims that cinema became what it is because it coincided with Thomas Edison, Beethoven and Gustave Flaubert. Edison for the technology, Beethoven for structure, Flaubert for realism.

“When you listen to Beethoven’s music now, and hear those sudden shifts in tonality, rhythm, and musical focus, it’s as though you can hear the grammar of film--cuts, dissolves, fades, superimposures, long shots, close shots--being worked out in musical terms. 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.

“And then along came film: a medium ideally suited to the dynamic representation of closely observed reality. And so these two great rivers of the nineteenth century--realism from literature and painting, and dynamism, from music--surged together within the physical framework of film to emerge, within a few decades, in the new artistic form of cinema.”

He is immensely stimulating, although he fails to acknowledge that the underlying power of the movies is that they so closely approximate the condition of dreaming and connect us to the wonders and horrors of the unconscious. I believe the future of film lies in those dark depths, to the heirs of Luis Bunuel, in the twisting ways of “Mulholland Drive.”

This book should be required reading for anyone working in film and a pleasurable option for moviegoers who wish to deepen and enrich the experience.