Mark Nickolas Media Practices: Film Form (NMDS 5430) Prof.

Sam Ishii-Gonzales December 6, 2011

Walter Murch and Films Collaborative Relationship with the Audience

My short essay will focus on comments made by Walter Murch in his conversations with Michael Ondaatje in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film that spotlight films collaborative relationship with its audience: Passage 1: [O]ne of the most fruitful paradoxes, I think, is that even when the film is finished, there should be unresolved problems. Because theres another stage, beyond the finished film: when the audience views it. You want the audience to be co-conspirators in the creation of this work, just as much as the editor or the mixers or the cameraman or the actors are. (p. 105) Passage 2: [I]f a film can provoke the audiences participation if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work. How each moment gets completed depends on each individual person...its those individual reactions that make each person feel the film is speaking to him or her. (p. 46) Passage 3: [Y]ou have to have an intuition about the craft to begin with: for me, it begins with, Where is the audience looking? What are they thinking? As much as possible, you try to be the audience. At the point of transition from one shot to another, you have to be pretty sure where the audiences eye is looking, where the focus of attention is. That will either make the cut work or not...After each cut it takes a few milliseconds for the audience to discover where they should now be looking. If you dont carry their focus of interest across the cut points, if you make them search at every cut, they become disoriented and annoyed, without knowing why. (p. 41)

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Walter Murchs passages, highlighted above, have aided me in better understanding the goal and craft of successful filmmaking, regardless of genre. As I continue on my journey from the world of Democratic politics to that of a maker of feature-length political documentary films, the learning curve has remained quite steep, as expected. One quickly learns that simply knowing a subject matter very well, or even having experienced some success in various forms of storytelling (e.g., print, online, radio, etc.), is not sufficient to meld ones efforts into the form of a successful cinematic project (technical and aesthetic aspects of film production itself notwithstanding). A filmmaker must study, examine, and learn the unique language of cinema and how to construct that understanding into filmic prose. Thinking back to the first reading assignment in class Jean-Pierre Geuens Film School chapter in Film Production Theory where he emphasizes the failure of film schools today to ensure that its students are grounded in film theory and history just as they are in practice Murchs comments reinforce the notion that how a filmmaker communicates with his audience goes well beyond the mere technical. Instead, one must understand and embrace the collaborative, two-way relationship that exists between film (and its makers) and the viewers. Early in my studies, I realized that how stories were told separated filmmakers: good ones were able to show rather than tell; great ones allowed us to experience. Murch hints that it is through a filmmakers ability to engage each viewer that separates the truly talented from the rest. Instead of one-way lectures where audiences passively absorb, a filmmaker must spark a two-way dialogue where the viewers become an active part of the creative and narrative process. Murch makes clear that it not enough to capture beautiful images and sound with a compelling story or subject. Indeed, these are necessary conditions; they are not, however, sufficient ones for great filmmaking. What is required is a relationship with an audience that, for about two hours, agrees to go on a journey with the filmmaker.

Nickolas 3 Passage 1: [O]ne of the most fruitful paradoxes, I think, is that even when the film is finished, there should be unresolved problems. Because theres another stage, beyond the finished film: when the audience views it. You want the audience to be coconspirators in the creation of this work, just as much as the editor or the mixers or the cameraman or the actors are.(p. 105) This passage reminded me of an early class discussion relating to Franz Kafkas The Trial where it was offered that one effective tool for co-opting the audiences active participation is to paint characters or narratives with minimal concrete information, leaving much concealed or withheld, thus creating a world with little description and leaving it to the viewer to fill in the gaps. Another vehicle for this engagement is through the use of long takes, where the audience is almost compelled to participate in the evolution of the scene. Instead of being taken on a cinematic ride where a narrative is spelled out through a rapid series of cuts and effects, the indirection and uncertainty that comes with compositional elements like the long take demands our involvement and attention. The audience is even expected to share in some of the heavy lifting. For example, some of the unresolved problems that Murch mentions above might be suggested through inference simply by how a film is edited. During lecture concerning Dont Look Now, we learned that ambiguity in editing such as the suggested interconnectivity of events or images can alone create a deeper level of audience engagement. Similarly, through Soviet montage, the spectator is forced to become an active participant in the narratives meaning as it attempts to make sense of the colliding, overlapping, and juxtaposing images that are laid on top of each other. Eisenstein tells us that through this use of montage, the audience actively participates in constructing and calculating meaning. By creating discontinuity in his images, Eisenstein believed that the audience would feel compelled to resolve the ambiguity and actively participate in its continuity. In these cases, the audience becomes co-conspirators in much the same way as Murch suggests. As an aspiring filmmaker, these lessons are priceless in understanding that cinema, unlike television, expects and demands a level of engagement and complexity that is not entirely apparent at the surface. Rather than simply telling our stories like a parent reading a book to a child, we should force our viewers to construct meaning from what is presented and allow them to be part of this creative process.

Nickolas 4 Passage 2: [I]f a film can provoke the audiences participation if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work. How each moment gets completed depends on each individual person...its those individual reactions that make each person feel the film is speaking to him or her. (p. 46) While this passage admittedly encompasses much of what was discussed in the previous one, there are a few additional elements at work here. First, as we learned in class, the attempts by Hollywood studios to demand that filmmakers clarify and resolve ambiguity in their films have eliminated one of the more effective vehicles for collaborative engagement with the audience. In contrast to the heydays of classical cinema, the modern approach demands a sense of closure in its films, not tolerating ambiguous endings or unclear narratives.

Also, in films like Citizen Kane, which championed the use of deep focus and long takes, the audience is provided with multiple vectors of interest in each shot. Dispensing with the usual cinematic tradition of rapid succession shot/reverse-shot, Orson Welles style permits us to keep continually aware of everyone (or everything) in the scene, allowing the spectators eyes to wander around the screen and focus on specific items of interest, be it on the actor who is speaking, or the one who is not. Such freedom not only creates a collaborative relationship with the viewer, but also individualizes the experience, allowing each person to form a different impression of what is playing out before them. From the perspective of storytelling, Murchs individualized approach might take the form of paring the characters dialogue to omit statements which explicitly declare their feelings or intentions, ceding that job to the viewer to assemble. In fact, it often said that a film is a novel turned inside out. In writing, a characters inner motives and emotions are described by the author and it is left to us to create our own mental image of that world. A good film should do the opposite, showing the visible and implying what is concealed. The explicit is made implicit. The invisible visible.

Nickolas 5 Passage 3: [Y]ou have to have an intuition about the craft to begin with: for me, it begins with, Where is the audience looking? What are they thinking? As much as possible, you try to be the audience. At the point of transition from one shot to another, you have to be pretty sure where the audiences eye is looking, where the focus of attention is. That will either make the cut work or not...After each cut it takes a few milliseconds for the audience to discover where they should now be looking. If you dont carry their focus of interest across the cut points, if you make them search at every cut, they become disoriented and annoyed, without knowing why. (p. 41) This final passage from Murch reacquainted me with Michelangelo Antonionis dictum that spoke of the need to capture a reality that is never static but always moving toward or away from a moment of crystallization. What Murch does with his editing working with specific points on the screen where the spectator is likely looking at any moment facilitates this sense of an ever-moving reality. Much of the story, particularly its emotional component, is told through his cuts as we take the audience on our journey. Murchs comment also reinforces the notion that a filmmaker is constantly arranging the images of his film in a rhythmic pattern to convey and evoke specific emotional connections with the audience. The editing process itself is paramount in creating emotion, and is one of the foundations of Soviet montage theory. So powerful is this effect that Murch reminds us that if we fail at the task, our audience may viscerally react, often without understanding why it is they are feeling that way. Finally, as we also learned during lecture, mise-en-scene is not simply the arrangement of all the things in front of the camera to be shot (including lighting, camera placement, lenses, dcor, location, etc.), but also how the audience will see and experience it. Simply, this goes to the concept that one cannot separate the look of the film from what the film is about. Form and content are conjoined cinematic twins. In fact, it might be said that mise-en-scene is what we see in the film, while editing is what we do not see. During my two semesters in the Media Studies program at The New School, the most significant lesson that I continue to learn is that what a film doesnt say is often as important as what it does say. Similar to the concept of negative space in photography or design, what a filmmaker chooses to remain concealed or obscured or left off-screen, just beyond the reach of the spectator, forces the audience to engage

Nickolas 6 and connect dots on their own terms. I would argue that this ability is what separates a seasoned filmmaker from a beginner. The passages from Walter Murch emphasize these fundamental points. Cinema is a language of its own, and for those us working to attain a basic level of literacy we must remain dedicated to speaking it and immersing ourselves in it full-time. The perspectives and insights of Walter Murch or Jean-Pierre Geuens or Sam Ishii-Gonzales or Andre Bazin or the Soviet film theorists provide us with crucial building blocks as we go about understanding this fascinating and amazingly complex world in hopes of one day having the privilege of leading packed theaters on a journey that they will always remember.