Walter Murch: “Three Fathers of Cinema”
I’ve mentioned before that one of the best books on screenwriting I’ve read is actually about editing: “In the Blink of an Eye”, written by the esteemed Walter Murch. Here is a nice video (18 minutes long), a PowerPoint presentation with Murch talking about the “three fathers of cinema”: Beethoven, Flaubert, Edison.
Re Beethoven and “dynamism”:
“Listen to the music [by Beethoven] and imagine you are hearing the grammar of cinema: the idea of the cut, the idea of the fade, the idea of the dissolve, the idea of parallel action, the idea of the long shot, of the close-ups, that kind of dynamics is what cinema is all about… [quoting a 19th century French music critic referring to Beethoven’s music] ‘He puts doves and crocodiles in the same cage.’”
Re Flaubert and “realism”:
“Even Balzac who prefigures Flaubert has a relentless insistence on plot where with Flaubert, he will detach at times from plot and simply describe in what we may call ‘ordinary reality,’ but he will describe it with a sense of poetry that makes you see what it is he’s describing.”
A translation of the excerpt from “Madame Bovary” Murch highlights in his presentation:
“One day he got there about three o’clock. Everybody was in the fields. He went into the kitchen, but did not at once catch sight of Emma; the outside shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood the sun sent across the flooring long fine rays that were broken at the corners of the furniture and trembled along the ceiling. Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.”
And finally Thomas Edison who invented the technology allowing cinema to exist.
Murch’s basic point is that the dynamism ushered into music by Beethoven and the realism brought into literature by Flaubert infused culture in the West throughout the latter part of the 19th century, so that when Edison invented synced sound and motion picture, cinema essentially exploded into being, running with the idea of dynamic realism as its operating assumption, and creating motion pictures that audiences were prepared to watch and enjoy.
Per Murch: “Cinema is the dynamic representation of closely observed reality.”
For more on Murch, go here
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