Murch

‘Films aren’t finished. They are abandoned.’ With this statement, the film editor Walter Murch explains clearly that a film is never really completed. At a certain point you just stop working on it. Murch, the editor behind major films such as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and The English Patient is both a commanding and passionate old hand at editing. He abandoned a career as oceanographer to found American Zoetrope Studios with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. In the documentary Murch his always thoughtful and committed reflections on his craft are brought together in what is basically one long interesting lecture on editing. With so much knowledge and experience, Murch moves easily from the simplest principles of drama to the principles of editing that can turn film into art.
Murch, who always works on important scenes standing up in order to involve his whole body in the editing process, is portrayed fairly statically in this documentary. Yet the film fragments he edited that are screened show very clearly just how complex, dynamic and real his contribution was to the creation of successful films. Murch is both a homage to a person and to one of the most important and relatively underexposed aspects of film making. (EH)