Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design By Walter Murch Faber & Faber, 368 pages, $45.Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design By Walter Murch Faber & Faber, 368 pages, $45 Now 82 years old, Walter Murch is the Hollywood legend you’ve never heard of. He was the film editor on Julia, the sound editor on Godfather, Godfather II, and American…
Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design
By Walter Murch
Faber & Faber, 368 pages, $45
Now 82 years old, Walter Murch is the Hollywood legend you’ve never heard of. He was the film editor on Julia, the sound editor on Godfather, Godfather II, and American Graffiti, and both film and sound editor on Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Godfather III, Ghost, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain, among many other movies. He’s won Oscars in both categories. And now he’s the author of a fun, fascinating book about these often neglected aspects of filmmaking entitled Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design.
Murch’s title comes from the Russian author Maxim Gorky, who in 1896, at age 28, attended a screening in Nizhny Novgorod by the Lumière brothers, the French cinematic pioneers whose Cinématographe, a combined camera and projector, enabled them to share the short films they’d made with audiences hither and yon. Cinema was then in its infancy — the brothers had been exhibiting their work publicly for just a year or so — but at first Gorky wasn’t impressed by their revolutionary moving images. What did finally thrill him was something that we would now take entirely for granted: a cut. The brothers’ film had been capturing a street scene in Lyon, and then, as Gorky later wrote, “suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you — watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit.”
Indifferent to the magic of film, in short, Gorky was dazzled by the magic of film editing.
Before it was tried, observes Murch, there was no reason to take it for granted that film editing would even “work.” In other words, it might well have turned out that the human brain was not wired in such a way as to process sudden shifts from one moving image to another. Happily, however, “audiences not only quickly grasped the grammar of continuity, but came to enjoy, and then hunger for, those sudden and often delightfully surprising juxtapositions — visual chord changes, so to speak.”
There are, Murch points out, two basic ways of thinking about film editing. In the Romance and Slavic languages, the words for film editing — montage, montaggio, montaje, монтаж — “emphasise the architectural aspects of our work: a plumber will monte together the pipes of a house, just as a film editor will plumb together the shots of a film.” By contrast, the English, German, and Scandinavian words — editing, Schnitt, redigering — “highlight instead the cutting-down and reorganisation of a pre-existing assembly.”
Film editing, of course, involves both construction and cutting down, but the ultimate goal is to put something together. Hence Murch prefers the word montage to editing. After all, as he puts it, the word “editor” suggests that a film editor’s task, like that of book or newspaper editors, “is to cut down and rearrange a work created by someone else”; but in reality it’s the film editor “who produces the first version, painstakingly constructing it over many weeks (or months!) from thousands of shots, guided by the screenplay and the director’s notes. This is shown to the director, who suggests changes.
