For the first entry in a cornucopia of Walter Murch items, Harper’s Magazine devotes 13 pages of its November issue to essayist Lawrence Wechsler‘s vertiginously intricate contemplation of “the trouble with war movies,” and a big chunk of his time is spent talking to editor Walter Murch about his work on Apocalypse Now and as editor of Sam Mendes‘ Jarhead, set in the First Gulf War of the early 90s of the last century. (It’s a big raft: there’s even room for John Milius.) Wechsler reveals that the “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence from Apocalypse Now is incorporated into the newer film in a way that may be unprecedented: a recognized, recognizable bite of culture refashioned into another work of art by one of its key original creators. “The result is… one of the most deeply affecting and disconcerting scenes in recent film history,” avers Mr. Wechsler, “thanks in no small part to the lavish ministrations of [Murch], who in this context has himself been having to harrow the distinctly unsettling task of revisiting and revisioning a scene he labored over for months almost 30 years ago as a crucial member of the original Apocalypse Now team, this time, alas, in an entirely new and even more disturbing light.

“At times I get to feeling like I’m inside my own Escher drawing,” Murch admitted… One hand, as it were, drawing the other into being: his past decisions shaping his current ones, and vice versa… Patiently, meticulously, Murch keeps interleafing the scenes. “It’s probably best that I’m the one doing this… If it weren’t me, some other editor would either be overly protective of the original—wary of breaking any of the precious china—or else just treating it all like raw material.” If you’ve read “The Conversations,” the literate and discursive book-length exchange about the junction of movies and life, between Murch and “The English Patient” novelist Michael Ondaatje, or listened to the Cold Mountain DVD commentary with Anthony Minghella and Murch, or dipped into the pages of the gratifyingly rich post-production procedural, “Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch edited Cold Mountain Using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema,” by Charles Koppelman, you’ll be prepared for the intricate dissection Murch & Co. provide in the newsstand-only article. [Francis Coppola retains rights to refuse the final use of the footage, which was pending at the time the article went to press.]
AND OVER AT KAMERA, MURCH MUSES MIGHTILY ABOUT SOUND FOR 2,000 WORDS with Peter Cowie. “The human brain is wired to spend more of its computing power on vision than it does on sound. So what happens is that when we hear a sound we don’t hear it consciously, but it has an effect on us, and that effect we sort of re-process and render into an attribute of the visuals. So it’s very rare that an audience will hear sound for what it is. Usually what’s happening is that the sound is conditioning and colouring the way we’re perceiving the visual.” There’s a nice passage about whether films are too loud in latter-day theaters, followed by this: “The home experience will never equal the theatrical experience because you can never get 600 people sitting with you in your living-room. It’s just by the very nature of the beast – when you look at a film in a theatre it’s a communal experience, and there’s something both tangible and intangible about the presence of hundreds of other people with you watching the movie. You see different things in a picture under those circumstances than when you watch a film at home… The fact that you have left your home and paid money and you’re willingly sitting in the dark with six hundred other strangers to watch a film that makes you see different things in it even if, technically, everything is exactly the same.” [Murch more at the link.] Plus! Murch will hold a “conversation” the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY on 19 November. And! Filmsound has the Walter Murch obsessive’s one-stop archive, including an interview with poet Joy Katz from Parnassus magazine, on beauty: “When I know there are beautiful shots waiting for me in the dailies, I want to use them to their best advantage, but quickly become ruthless if the shots turn out to be superfluous to the story. Their beauty then almost turns into a liability, like handsome but empty-headed people. I much prefer a necessary shot to a beautiful shot. If it is necessary and beautiful, so much the better.”

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