Events

Cinema as a State of Mind - Past and Future

An Evening with Walter Murch

When:
Saturday, April 23, 2011, 7:30pm - 7:30pm
Description:

Legendary film editor, theorist and artist Walter Murch maps out his intriguing speculations on what would have happened had the cinema been invented a century earlier. Focusing on three key figures – Beethoven, Flaubert and Edison – Murch uses soundscapes and moving images to illustrate the conditions necessary for the birth of the medium, and considers whether the beginning of the 21st century constitutes a comparable era of cultural and technological change.

Walter Murch has been editing sound in Hollywood since his first job on Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People (1969). He edited sound on American Graffiti (1973) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), won his first Academy Award nomination for The Conversation (1974), won his first Oscar for Apocalypse Now (1979), and won an unprecedented double Oscar for sound and film editing for his work on The English Patient (1996). Most recently he helped reconstruct Touch of Evil (1958) to Orson Welles' original notes, and edited The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). For his work on Apocolypse Now, Murch coined the term "Sound Designer," and helped to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level.

Murch has written one book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye (2001). He was also the subject of Michael Ondaatje's book The Conversations (2002),  which consists of several conversations between Ondaatje and Murch; the book emerged from Murch's editing of The English Patient, which was based on Ondaatje's novel of the same name.

This event is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies.