If one goes through the history of Sound in Film, one will eventually come across Walter Murch – a film master who reigned in the 70s with his ideas of film editing, especially sound editing and mixing. He is most known for editing the Sound of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), The Godfather: Part II (1982 – won oscar), The Godfather: Part III (1990), The Conversation (1974), George Lucas‘s American Grafitti (1973), and THX 1138 (1971); and Anthony Minghella‘s The English Patient (1996 – won Oscar). All of these films and many other nominations. Murch is mainly appreciated for his contribution to Film Studies in Editing and Sound Editing, remaining one of the most influential figures in the field. The Blink of an Eye: A perspective on film editing (2005) is still a referent book for many filmmakers, where he encourages them to put aside film technicalities and enhance and value the emotionality of each scene and cut.
For many years, Walter Murch published many articles about film sound, now available on filmsound.org – a website dedicated to analysing film sound design. He’s papers are quite enjoyable, not only by the romantic and expressive way of his writing, which exalts and puts Sound on a pedestal but also by the passionate way he talks about Sound. We must understand where Murch comes from when reading his book or articles. He is a two-time Academy Award winner who spent most of his life devoted solely to films, surrounded by filmmakers who are also very connected to the western American film scene. I’m talking about the million-dollar quartet of Film in the 70s and 80s: him, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas (not a quartet, but close). They weren’t the million-dollar quartet, but the American Zoetrope, a privately run film production company based in San Francisco, California (currently owned by the Coppola’s – Sofia and Roman). They all went to the same school, The Southern California Film School, studied the same things, and most probably aspired to the same goals.
Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See works as an ode to his career and the history of Fim Sound throughout the XX century and as a request to all sound designers, editors, or in general, filmmakers to think more about Sound. Knowing his career means understanding that he spent more time working than researching. Therefore, his article comes more precisely from a sound enthusiast perspective rather than a scholar’s.
The article begins with a conversation between him and Richard Portman – a fellow mixer on The Godfather (1972), who later won an oscar for best Sound design in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter in 1978.
“That! was when Sound! was King!”, he said, gesturing dramatically into the upper darknesses of Stage 7.
Stage 7 was where classic film director and owner of Goldwyn Studio Samuel Goldwyn would direct one of his musicals. Walter Murch refers specifically to Whoopee (1930), starring Eddie Cantor and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. He mentioned that back in the day, the man behind the window, Gordon Sawyer, the director of Sound, would be more important than Goldwyn. His “CUTS” were louder and more determinant. When films relied on Vitaphone’s discs – a sound-on-disc system developed by Bell – there was margin to edit. What was recorded on set was what the spectator would hear. Therefore, as Portman said, the Sound would be an authentic “King”. In contrast with contemporary filmmaking, the mand behind the window no longer exists. Instead, there’s hidden somewhere on set a guy tweaking knobs on a vertical sound cart, and his “CUTS” are miserable compared to the cinematographers or, of course, the directors.
Forty-five years seemed to have turned (sound) from king to footman.
Murch mentions the technical evolution that Sound has undergone, from its appearance to nowadays. From the mid-1920s to the 1930s, many productions had the Vitaphone system, meaning that music, dialogue and sound effects would have to be recorded simultaneously. Vitaphone was later succeeded by analogue optical sound-on-film technologies, Fox’s Movietone. It allowed films to add sound effects in post-production, which back in 1936 was a max of 17 sounds.
In the beginning of the sound era, it was so astonishing to hear people speak and move and sing and shoot one another in sync that almost any sound was more than acceptable.
Then Walter begins to contrast the human experience with sound recording, referring to the invention of the tinfoil phonograph by Thomas Edison. It was unthinkable to hear oneself till Edison’s apparatus appeared. In Congo, for example, King Ndombe consented to have his voice recorded in 1904 but later regretted it when people cried, “The King sits still, his lips are sealed, while the white man forces his soul to sing!” as his voice was being played back. Interesting contrast.
Optical film was an important invention for Film Sound. From 17 sound effects to thousands, from mono to stereo. However, the sound department needed to follow the speed of technology, which soon became obsolete and forgotten. Talkies dominated the screen and sound star. However, Walter Murch lived in an era where sound design was about the explode again. After a strict post-production that was “bogged down in the bureaucratic and technical inertia at the studios” in Finian’s Rainbow (1968), Francis Ford Coppola didn’t want to go through that sort of process again. That was why he, alongside George Lucas and Murch, moved to San Francisco, where they founded American Zoetrope.
With the invention of the transistor, Coppola went to Hamburg, Germany, to buy brand-new editing and mixing equipment from KEM Studiotechnik. Walter Murch was hired to use them. From Zoetrope, films like The Conversation or American Graffiti were produced with this new gear. However, they weren’t the only ones using the new kit. After the release of The Godfather, Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) topped it, and later after the success of Lucas’s American Grafitti, followed Star Wars (1977), which beat Jaws. Star Wars brought the 70-millimetre Dolby, allowing new developments in Dolby Cinema Sound. Then, in 1979, it came to Apocalypse Now, a new standard came to stay for many more years:
Three channels of sound behind the screen left and right surrounds behind the audience, and low-frequency enhancement.
Murch is talking about the 5.1 sound system. From that point onwards, the sound was set free and evolved ferociously. It now relied on the director’s ability to think of audiovisual depth. As Murch refers, sound can’t be used “flat”. A door closing must mean more than what it represents. The image of a door closing accompanied by the correct “slam” can indicate not only the material of the door and the space around it but also the emotional state of the person closing it.
We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see it”
Walter Murch finishes the article by mentioning the depth or the dimensionality of images and sounds when “stretched too far.” By stretching, he means the layers of juxtaposition and overlapping transients in a scene. When both cooperate, significant meaning and tension come out of it. He culminates with the greatest quote on the whole article:
The moment of greatest dimension is always the moment of greatest tension.
Lastly, Murch questions whether Sight will remain the king and Sounds the Queen. It was later proved wrong by Lucrecia martel, who inverted roles.
References
Murch, W. (2001) Stretching the sound to help the mind see. San Francisco: filsound.org.