Posts Tagged ‘film’
“Mangoes will make you forget anything but mangoes”*…
… Or not. As Christin Bohnke explains, sometimes a mango is more than just a mango…
What happens when ideologies are destroyed? When beliefs that shaped generations dissolve overnight? In the wreckage of old traditions, new symbols are created, and meaning is projected onto what was previously trivial. But not all of these new symbols are coherent or easily legible. Some are outright weird. Few events in history demonstrate the absurdity of political symbolism as clearly as the Mao Mango Mania that swept China during the infancy of the Cultural Revolution.
In 1966, Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party and China’s supreme leader, set in motion the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a campaign to realign China with his revolutionary vision. His goal was to transform society, both economically and ideologically, by purging everything deemed traditional or capitalist. Over the next ten years, the Cultural Revolution changed the country in profound and painful ways, leading to more than a million estimated deaths as well as to immense human suffering.
Historian Lü Xiuyuan describes the period between 1966 and 1968 as the most destructive years of the entire movement. Following Mao’s directive to destroy the “Four Olds” (ideas, cultures, customs, and habits), his paramilitary youth groups, the Red Guards, swept the country with violence. They identified, tortured, and killed so-called “counterrevolutionaries,” raided temples and schools, and destroyed priceless artifacts. In 1968, university campuses, middle schools, and other public spaces became the sites of bloody battles, not only between Red Guards and alleged counterrevolutionaries but also between revolutionary factions. The chaos of the “Red Terror” couldn’t continue indefinitely, so Mao determined that Chinese workers would help suppress the Red Guard, restore order, and continue the revolution in a more measured manner. In this endeavor, Mao was helped, improbably, by a box of yellow-fleshed fruit.
In August 1968, a visiting foreign minister from Pakistan, Mian Arshad Hussain, gave Mao a box of mangoes as a gift during a state visit. Presenting mangoes has a long tradition in Pakistan, but in China, the fruit was virtually unknown. Mao passed the box to workers occupying the Tsinghua campus in Beijing, who were attempting to control the Red Guards stationed there. The scholar of Chinese visual culture Alfreda Murck writes that the mangoes carried an implicit message: from now on, the workers, not the Red Guards, would be in charge of education and the transformation of China in Mao’s image.
According to Murck, even Mao could not have anticipated the consequences of his gift. Because the mangoes came from the supreme leader, they were transformed, in the eyes of the workers, from a simple fruit into an object endowed with attributes of the divine. William H. Hinton, the author of Fanshen, compiled eyewitness accounts of workers who reported staying up all night, touching the mangoes, and marveling at their new station as protégés of the Chairman. Using the momentum, the official party cadres concocted a propaganda campaign surrounding the mangoes, workers, and Mao, and in doing so, according to the political scientist Richard Baum, effectively signed “the death warrant of the Red Guards.”
Quickly, the Red Guards were disbanded, many of them sent for reeducation in the countryside where they labored and lived alongside rural peasants. By contrast, the workers who received Mao’s mangoes, a sign of his favor, were energized and became Cultural Revolution leaders. Yet, their promotion was an illusion. True power lay with the People’s Liberation Army. Despite, or because of that, the workers—and the mangoes—played a significant role in official propaganda in the months to come.
When the workers returned to their factories after putting down the Red Guards, Mao had a fresh mango delivered to them. Workers held welcoming ceremonies for the fruit, preserved it in wax, placed it on altars, and bowed to it when walking by. In one factory, the fruit was boiled down into sacred mango water; each devotee drank a spoonful. From there on, the cult of the mango escalated. Wax and even plastic mangoes were quickly produced in Chinese factories and appeared all over the country, often displayed in glass cases. Images of the mango adorned plates, wedding gifts, and cigarette packages. It was stitched onto blankets, and propaganda teams armed with wax replicas were sent into the remotest corners of the country to spread its lore. More than seventy different types of mango badges to stitch onto clothes were given away for free or sold at a low price to those who couldn’t afford more expensive mango-themed items. Alongside the mangoes were mentions of Mao’s selflessness and love for the people (though no reference to the fate of the Red Guards), and many badges bore the slogan “With each mango profound kindness.”…
… During the 1968 National Day parade in Beijing, the mango was front and center. At least three mango-themed floats participated in the parade, decorated with slogans that emphasized the significance of the working class, as well as a colossal white statue of Mao. The parade reinforced the importance of Mao as the supreme leader and the mango as a symbol of his power.
According to development studies scholar Xing Li, Mao viewed ideology as the primary means of mobilizing the masses and driving change, putting special emphasis on themes such as dedication, self-sacrifice, and hard work. The mango was a perfect vessel for Mao’s “love” for the workers. Unlike already established symbols such as the peony, peach, or pomegranate, the mango had no preexisting meaning in China and, importantly, no association with emperors or divinity. Quickly, rumors spread that mango trees only blossom every century—or every thousand years, according to others—and that eating the fruit would bring about a long life, similar to the peaches of immortality that feature prominently in Chinese legends. Mao’s refusal to keep the mangoes for himself was therefore seen as a great sacrifice on behalf of his people.
The veneration of the mango coincided with a high point in Mao’s personality cult. In the 1960s, one billion copies of the “Little Red Book,” a collection of Mao’s quotes, were printed. The book had to be waved and quoted at the beginning of each workday and whenever someone made a political statement. Mao was everywhere. And so were his mangoes. They became inextricably linked, and criticism of one meant criticism of the other. Murck tells of a dentist in Sichuan province, for example, who, after seeing a mango paraded through his town, said that the fruit resembled a sweet potato. He was arrested, tried as a counterrevolutionary, marched through the streets, and executed. His children were sent to the countryside for reeducation. Given the serious consequences of even the slightest criticism, it’s impossible to say how many people genuinely participated in the mango cult and how many complied out of fear.
Political movements need symbols to foster cohesion and emotional connection, but for these to thrive and remain, they must have at least some internal logic, cultural coherence, or tradition. The mango was an artificial symbol, created randomly, and the people’s devotion to the fruit must have been at least partially performative. By 1969, the mango cult had already begun to decline; it was no longer featured in official campaigns, although the sheer volume of mango-themed products ensured that it didn’t disappear entirely until the mid-1970s. After Mao’s death in 1976 and the 1980s reassessment of his personality cult, it became acceptable to discard mango ephemera that some Chinese still kept in their homes, or more prudently, to repurpose the wax mangoes as candles. Because the mango was so closely linked to Mao, it couldn’t remain a meaningful symbol without him.
Still, the mango as a political symbol never entirely faded. US-based Chinese author Ha Jin, who served in the Chinese army at the time of the Cultural Revolution and has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, wrote in his 2019 poem “A Sacred Mango:”
The mango was exhibited in the center of the hall.
We lined up to look at it
and to show our gratitude and respect.But that night some curious child tasted the fruit
and was not caught.
Our mayor, frightened and outraged, said,
“Damn it, if I knew which son of a rabbit bit the mango
I would turn his whole family
into counter-revolutionaries!”But what could we do?
We substituted a wooden mango for a real one.For Ha Jin, as for others, the mango remains not a sign of Mao’s power, but a reminder of the Cultural Revolution’s absurdity and the arbitrary labeling of counterrevolutionaries. Despite being a short-lived propaganda tool, the mango’s symbolism endures as a testament to the irrationality of Mao’s extreme personality cult.
Commercial production of the mango in China began around that time, but only really accelerated in the 1980s. Although some people still recall the mango cult and spoke about it in their interviews with Murck, today the meaning of this particular fruit is largely forgotten, and the mango, far from symbolizing Mao’s eternal love and sacrifice for the working class, has transformed once again. This time, into a refreshing summer treat…
A fleeting cult built around a fruit exposes the logic, and illogic, of Mao’s personality cult: “When Mao’s Mango Mania Took Over China,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Eve Babitz
###
As we pare away the peel, we might send decorative birthday greetings to Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha; she was born on this date in 1909. Better known by her stage name, Carmen Miranda (and her nickname, “the Brazilian Bombshell”), she was a successful singer, dancer, and actress.
As a young woman, Miranda designed clothes and hats in a boutique before making her debut as a singer, recording with composer Josué de Barros in 1929. Miranda’s 1930 recording of “Taí (Pra Você Gostar de Mim),” written by Joubert de Carvalho, catapulted her to stardom in Brazil as the foremost interpreter of samba. In 1939 she was invited to Broadway by producer Lee Shubert, and quickly lured from there to Hollywood, where she made 14 films in as many years.
Miranda did much to popularize Brazilian music and raise American awareness of Latin culture, for which she has been honored (e.g., with a museum) in Brazil. Here, she is largely remebered for her style, in particular for her large “fruit hats.”
“[They] would think that the truth is nothing but the shadows cast by the artifacts.”*…
How do AI models “understand” and represent reality? Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? As Ben Brubaker reports, researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they may be converging toward a singular “Platonic” way to represent the world…
Read a story about dogs, and you may remember it the next time you see one bounding through a park. That’s only possible because you have a unified concept of “dog” that isn’t tied to words or images alone. Bulldog or border collie, barking or getting its belly rubbed, a dog can be many things while still remaining a dog.
Artificial intelligence systems aren’t always so lucky. These systems learn by ingesting vast troves of data in a process called training. Often, that data is all of the same type — text for language models, images for computer vision systems, and more exotic kinds of data for systems designed to predict the odor of molecules or the structure of proteins. So to what extent do language models and vision models have a shared understanding of dogs?
Researchers investigate such questions by peering inside AI systems and studying how they represent scenes and sentences. A growing body of research has found that different AI models can develop similar representations, even if they’re trained using different datasets or entirely different data types. What’s more, a few studies have suggested that those representations are growing more similar as models grow more capable. In a 2024 paper, four AI researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that these hints of convergence are no fluke. Their idea, dubbed the Platonic representation hypothesis, has inspired a lively debate among researchers and a slew of follow-up work.
The team’s hypothesis gets its name from a 2,400-year-old allegory by the Greek philosopher Plato. In it, prisoners trapped inside a cave perceive the world only through shadows cast by outside objects. Plato maintained that we’re all like those unfortunate prisoners. The objects we encounter in everyday life, in his view, are pale shadows of ideal “forms” that reside in some transcendent realm beyond the reach of the senses.
The Platonic representation hypothesis is less abstract. In this version of the metaphor, what’s outside the cave is the real world, and it casts machine-readable shadows in the form of streams of data. AI models are the prisoners. The MIT team’s claim is that very different models, exposed only to the data streams, are beginning to converge on a shared “Platonic representation” of the world behind the data.
“Why do the language model and the vision model align? Because they’re both shadows of the same world,” said Phillip Isola, the senior author of the paper.
Not everyone is convinced. One of the main points of contention involves which representations to focus on. You can’t inspect a language model’s internal representation of every conceivable sentence, or a vision model’s representation of every image. So how do you decide which ones are, well, representative? Where do you look for the representations, and how do you compare them across very different models? It’s unlikely that researchers will reach a consensus on the Platonic representation hypothesis anytime soon, but that doesn’t bother Isola.
“Half the community says this is obvious, and the other half says this is obviously wrong,” he said. “We were happy with that response.”…
Read on: “Distinct AI Models Seem To Converge On How They Encode Reality,” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
Bracket with: “AGI is here (and I feel fine),” from Robin Sloan and “We Need to Talk About How We Talk About ‘AI’,” from Emily Bender and Nanna Inie.
* from Socrates “Allegory of the Cave,” in Plato’s Republic (Book VII)
###
As we interrogate ideas and Ideas, we might recall that it was on this date that the fictional HAL 9000 computer became operational, according to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey., in which the artificially-intelligent computer states: “I am a HAL 9000 computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.” (Kubrik’s 1968 movie adaptation put his birthdate in 1992.)
“The public domain is the basis for our art, our science, and our self-understanding. It is the raw material from which we make new inventions and create new cultural works.”*…
From Nancy Drew to Animal Crackers to The Maltese Falcon, 1930’s greatest works enter the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026. Aaron Moss counsels us to expect celebration, confusion, and at least one Betty Boop slasher film…
The weather’s getting colder, the nights are getting longer, and Hollywood has decided Betty Boop would be more marketable as a serial killer. It can only mean one thing: Public Domain Day 2026 is upon us.
Regular observers of copyright law’s favorite holiday know the drill: on January 1, 2026, a new crop of creative works from 1930 (along with sound recordings from 1925) will enter the public domain in the United States—ready to be remixed, recycled, or repurposed into B-grade horror films and ill-advised erotica.
This year’s film class is stacked with classics: Howard Hughes’s aviation epic Hell’s Angels (Jean Harlow’s screen debut and, at the time, the most expensive movie ever made); The Big Trail, featuring John Wayne in his first starring role; Greta Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie; Bing Crosby’s film debut in King of Jazz; and 1930 Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front. There’s plenty of comedy too, including the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, Laurel and Hardy’s Another Fine Mess, and Soup to Nuts, best remembered for featuring an early iteration of the Three Stooges.
Among the standout literary works in the Public Domain Day Class of 2026 are heavyweights like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Edna Ferber’s bestseller Cimarron, and Evelyn Waugh’s champagne-soaked satire Vile Bodies. Children’s literature fans can look forward to Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, Watty Piper’s The Little Engine That Could, and Elizabeth Coatsworth’s Newbery Medal winner The Cat Who Went to Heaven.
Not to take anything away from Hammett’s Sam Spade, but it’s an especially strong year for female detectives—both young and old. The earliest Nancy Drew mysteries from 1930 hit the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026, as does the first outing of the genteel Miss Marple in Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage. Maybe they can team up to solve the mystery of why Hollywood is only interested in using public domain characters to make schlocky horror films.
In the world of comics and animation, two Disney shorts featuring early versions of Pluto are also set to enter the public domain. The future canine star first appeared as an unnamed bloodhound in 1930’s The Chain Gang before resurfacing later that year as Minnie Mouse’s pet “Rover” in The Picnic. He wouldn’t officially become Mickey’s dog Pluto until 1931’s The Moose Hunt—a film set to enter the U.S. public domain in 2027…
Read on for a rundown of more film, characters, and music that’s about to be more freely available: “Public Domain Day 2026 Is Coming: Here’s What to Know,” from @copyrightlately.bsky.social.
* James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
The Holidays are upon us, and with them, (R)D’s annual solstice hiatus. Regular service will resume on or around January 2; in the meantime (and in lieu of an almanac entry), two seasonal offerings.
First, a collection of pieces from JSTOR: “Winter Holidays“…
December means the winter holidays are upon us: Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, St. Stephen’s Day, and New Year’s Eve, with all your favorite wintertime traditions. Celebrate with some seasonal scholarship below. All stories contain free links to the supporting academic research on JSTOR. Happy Holidays!
And then, with your correspondent’s seasonal best, two timely tunes:
“That’s the artist’s job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things”*…
Further, in a fashion, to last week’s post on literacy (and post-literacy), Nathan Gardels alerts us to a conversation between Ken Liu and Nils Gilman, in which Liu suggests that, in a way analogous to the the camera’s ability to capture motion (and thus, transform storytelling), AI is emerging as a new artistic medium for capturing subjective experience…
For the celebrated novelist Ken Liu, whose works include “The Paper Menagerie” and Chinese-to-English translation of “The Three-Body Problem,” science fiction is a way to plumb the anxieties, hopes and abiding myths of the collective unconscious.
In this pursuit, he argues in a Futurology podcast, AI should not be regarded as a threat to the distinctive human capacity to organize our reality or imagine alternative worlds through storytelling. On the contrary, the technology should be seen as an entirely new way to access that elusive realm beneath the surface and deepen our self-knowledge.
As a window into the interiority of others, and indeed, of ourselves, Liu believes the communal mirror of Large Language Models opens the horizons of how we experience and situate our presence in the world.
“It’s fascinating to me to think about AI as a potential new artistic medium in the same way that the camera was a new artistic medium,” he muses. What the roving aperture enabled was the cinematic art form of capturing motion, “so you can splice movement around … and can break all kinds of rules about narrative art that used to be true.
“In the dramatic arts, it was just assumed that because you had to perform in front of an audience on the stage, that you had to follow certain unities to make your story comprehensible. The unity of action, of place, of time. You can’t just randomly jump around, or the audience wouldn’t be able to follow you.
But with this motion-capturing machine, you can in fact do that. That’s why an actual movie is very different from a play.
You can do the reaction shots, you can do the montages, you can do the cuts, you can do the swipes, you can do all sorts of things in the language of cinema.
You can put audiences in perspectives that they normally can never be in. So it’s such a transformation of the understanding of presence, of how a subject can be present in a dramatic narrative story.”
He continues: “Rather than thinking about AI as a cheap way to replace filmmakers, to replace writers, to replace artists, think of [it] as a new kind of machine that captures something and plays back something. What is the thing that it captures and plays back? The content of thought, or subjectivity.”
The ancient Greeks called the content, or object of a person’s thought, “noema,” which is why this publication bears that name.
Liu thus invents the term “Noematograph” as analogous to “the cinematograph not for motion, but for thought … AI is really a subjectivity capturing machine, because by being trained on the products of human thinking, it has captured the subjectivities, the consciousnesses, that were involved in the creation of those things.”
Liu sees value in what some regard as the worst qualities of generative AI.
“This is a machine that allows people to play with subjectivities and to craft their own fictions, to engage in their own narrative self-construction in the process of working with an AI,” he observes. “The fact that AI is sycophantic and shapeable by you is the point. It’s not another human being. It’s a simulation. It’s a construction. It’s a fictional thing.
You can ask the AI to explain, to interpret. You can role-play with AI. You can explore a world that you construct together.
You can also share these things with other humans. One of the great, fun trends on the internet involving using AI, in fact, is about people crafting their own versions of prompts with models and then sharing the results with other humans.
And then a large group, a large community, comes together to collaboratively play with AI. So I think it’s the playfulness, it’s that interactivity, that I think is going to be really, really determinative of the future of AI as an art form.”
So, what will the product of this new art form look like?
“As a medium for art, what will come out of it won’t look anything like movies or novels …They’re going to be much more like conversations with friends. They’re going to be more like a meal you share with people. They are much more ephemeral in the moment. They’re about the participation. They’re about the consumer being also the creator.
They’re much more personalized. They’re about you looking into the strange mirror and sort of examining your own subjectivity.”
Much of what Liu posits echoes the views of the philosopher of technology, Tobias Rees, in a previous conversation with Noema.
As Rees describes it, “AI has much more information available than we do, and it can access and work through this information faster than we can. It also can discover logical structures in data — patterns — where we see nothing.
AI can literally give us access to spaces that we, on our own, qua human, cannot discover and cannot access.”
He goes on: “Imagine an AI model … that has access to all your data. Your emails, your messages, your documents, your voice memos, your photos, your songs, etc.
Such an AI system can make me visible to myself … it literally can lift me above me. It can show me myself from outside of myself, show me the patterns of thoughts and behaviors that have come to define me. It can help me understand these patterns, and it can discuss with me whether they are constraining me, and if so, then how. What is more, it can help me work on those patterns and, where appropriate, enable me to break from them and be set free.”
Philosophically put, says Rees, invoking the meaning of “noema” as Liu does, “AI can help me transform myself into an ‘object of thought’ to which I can relate and on which I can work.
“The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. And the kind of AI system I evoke here would be a philosopher’s dream. It could make us humans visible to ourselves from outside of us.”
Liu’s insight as a writer of science fiction realism is to see what Rees describes in the social context of interactive connectivity.
The arrival of new technologies is always disruptive to familiar ways of seeing that were cultivated from within established capacities. Letting go of those comforting narratives that guide our inner world is existentially disorienting. It is here that art’s vocation comes into play as the medium that helps move the human condition along. To see technology as an art form, as Liu does, is to capture the epochal moment of transformation that we are presently living through…
Is AI birthing a new art form? “From Cinema To The Noematograph,” @kyliu99.bsky.social and @nilsgilman.bsky.social in @futurologypod.bsky.social.
See/her the full conversation:
See also: “O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!“
* Miranda July
###
As we observe, with William Gibson, that the street finds its own uses for things, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that perhaps the pinnacle of cinema’s ability to capture motion was released: the most famous the the six films of Ben Hur, “the Charlton Heston version.”
At the time, Ben Hur had the largest budget ($15.175 million), the largest sets, a wardrobe staff of 100, over 200 artists, about 200 camels and 2,500 horses and about 10,000 extras.
Filming began on May 18, 1958, and didn’t wrap up until January 7, 1959. The film crew worked between 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week.
The chariot race scene lasts for nine minutes in the finished film and Miklos Rozsa’s film score is the longest ever composed for a film.
– source
“I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century.”*…
… and few filmmakers have been as fluent as the remarkable Walter Murch. In the context of a review of Murch’s recent book, Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, John Lahr offers an appreciation…
Walter Murch , the film editor and sound designer Francis Ford Coppola has described as ‘kind of like the film world’s one intellectual’, has what he terms standfleisch. He has spent most of his almost sixty years in the film industry standing his lanky frame in front of various editing consoles. ‘Why do surgeons, orchestra conductors and cooks all stand to do their jobs?’ he asks in Suddenly Something Clicked, a piñata of ideas and anecdotes about his life and work. It sheds light on his forensic craft, his distinctive way of thinking about editing and the making of many of the major films he’s worked on, including Apocalypse Now (1979), the Godfather trilogy (1972-90), The Conversation (1974), American Graffiti (1973) and the 1998 recut of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
To Murch, who has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for six more, film editing is a sensual ‘full-body’ experience: ‘a kind of dance, a choreography of images and sounds in the flow of time, forged in movement, eventually crystallising into permanence’. This embrace is a kind of erotic surrender to the unique metabolism of each story and its performers, a way of ‘drenching yourself in the sensibility of the film to the point where you’re alive to the smallest details’. ‘To watch Murch at work,’ Michael Ondaatje writes in The Conversations (2002), ‘is to see him delve into almost invisible specifics, where he harnesses and moves the bones or arteries of a scene, relocating them so they will alter the look of the features above the skin.’ The Conversations, a book of interviews with Murch, grew out of his work on the film version of Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient. ‘Most of the work he does is going to affect us subliminally,’ Ondaatje writes. ‘There is no showing off here.’ In the filigree of image and sound there comes a moment when, Murch says, he disappears into the film: ‘The shots, the emotions, the story seem to take over. Sometimes – the best times – this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that – it just created itself.”’
How heavy is this editorial heavy-lifting? Murch, of course, has done the maths. In the tale of the tape, Apocalypse Now is the undisputed champ. A single frame of 35 mm film weighs ‘five-thousandths of an ounce’; a reel of film – eleven minutes of picture and sound – weighs eleven pounds, or a pound a minute. By that calculation, the 1,250,000 feet of film shot by Coppola weighed more than 14,000 pounds or, as Murch puts it, ‘seven tons of film that had to be broken down, boxed, catalogued, put in accessible racks, moved around from editor to editor’. The average ratio of footage shot to footage used in a feature film is 20:1; the ratio for Apocalypse Now was 95:1. Over four years, Murch and his team got the film down from 236 hours to 2 hours and 27 minutes. This is as much bushwhacking as editing, finding the film’s story as well as its grammar, a feat Murch also accomplished for Coppola in The Conversation, which he restructured and essentially rewrote by cutting a third of the scenes…
… If Murch is full of wonder at film’s storytelling possibilities, the inventors of the moving picture were not. ‘The cinema is an invention without a future,’ Louis Lumière declared. The cinematograph, which he invented with his brother, Auguste, was a camera that recorded, developed and projected film onto a screen (one of the first being a bedsheet in a Russian brothel). Thomas Edison, though more interested in sound than image, developed the Kinetograph (an early motion-picture camera) and the Kinetoscope, which projected images that could be seen through peepholes. The breakthrough, which turned a 19th-century novelty into the 20th century’s only new art form, was the arrival of montage in 1901. The transition from one shot to another transformed motion pictures from a literal medium into a psychological and poetic one. Movies could now jump back and forth in time and space, ‘the cinematic equivalent to the discovery of flight’, as Murch sees it. Out of its illusion of naturalistic flow – 24 frames a projected second – a new grammar of seeing and of storytelling evolved: close-ups, dissolves, long shots, fade-outs.
‘“Filmic” juxtapositions are taking place in the real world not only when we dream but also when we are awake,’ Murch wrote in his book from 1992, In the Blink of an Eye. This explains why audiences find edited film a surprisingly familiar experience. Every blink is a thought. Every thought is a cut. In support of this belief, Murch quotes John Huston: ‘Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the lamp. Cut. Then you behold me.’ In cinema, Murch says, ‘at the moment you decide to cut, what you are saying is, in effect, “I am going to bring this idea to an end and start something new.”’…
… Murch jostles between metaphysics and neurology in his discussion of film editing, but biology is his link to theorising about sound design. Hearing develops four and a half months after conception. ‘We luxuriate in a continuous bath of sounds: the song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the piping of her intestines, the timpani of her heart,’ he writes. ‘The almost industrial intensity of this womb sound’ is about 75 decibels, ‘equivalent to … the cabin of a cruising passenger jet’. After birth, however, sound is gradually demoted. ‘Whatever virtues sound brings to film are largely perceived and appreciated by the audience in visual terms. The better the sound, the better the image.’ This fusing of sound and image is a sleight of mind in which the brain projects dimensionality onto the screen and makes it seem as if it had come from the image in the first place. ‘We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see/hear/see it.’
By his own admission, the phenomenal success of The Godfather triggered a revival of the metaphorical use of layered sound. Murch’s masterstroke of sound design was the addition – not indicated in the original script – of a rising metallic screech, as if from an overhead train, as Michael Corleone prepares to assassinate Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. ‘The rumbling and piercing metallic scream,’ he writes, ‘is not linked directly to anything seen on screen, and so the audience is made to wonder at least momentarily, if perhaps only subconsciously, “What is this?”’ Because it is detached from the image, the scream becomes a clue to Michael’s state of mind; it comes and goes, then grows louder and louder until he finally pulls out his gun. After he shoots, the sound stops abruptly.
‘Even for the most well-prepared of directors, there are limits to the imagination and memory,’ Murch writes. ‘It is the editor’s job to propose alternative scenarios as bait.’ In Apocalypse Now, the sampan massacre and, more important, the restoration of Captain Willard’s narration to the final script are down to Murch. ‘Willard is an observer – he is our eyes and ears in this diabolical landscape – and for most of the journey, until he gets to the Kurtz compound, he is a mostly silent passenger,’ Murch explains. ‘The audience judges character by comparing words spoken with actions taken, but if there are few words and fewer actions, the character has to emerge from somewhere else: out of an interior, quasi-novelistic voice.’ Following this editorial impulse, Murch dug out Willard’s voiceover from the original screenplay and recorded it himself, ‘lacing it selectively over the first half-hour of film’. His pitch worked. Willard’s voiceover was reinstated (as rewritten by Michael Herr), a crucial adjustment that spoke to the accuracy of Coppola’s dictum that a film director is the ‘ringmaster of a circus that’s inventing itself’.
Suddenly Something Clicked was conceived by Murch as a ‘three-braided rope – theory, practice and history’, a sort of intellectual high-wire act of technical expertise and personal anecdote. Like Murch himself, the book is unique. It’s designed for the reader to play with. Want to read Maxim Gorky’s reaction to seeing his first motion picture? Or see Orson Welles’s lost 58-page memo to the Universal Studios executives who took control of his production of Touch of Evil? Or hear the six pre-mixes and the final mix of the helicopters landing to ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in Apocalypse Now? Or watch an animated restructuring of the scenes in The Conversation? QR codes beside the text provide detours into these subjects and more. Similarly, there are chyrons of adages from other filmmakers and artists – ‘fortunes’, Murch calls them – at the bottom of every even-numbered page, intended as a kind of dialectical chorus to counterpoint or contradict his opinions. His high-spirited advice to film editors holds true for his readers: ‘Good luck! Make discoveries!’…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Every Blink,” from @lrb.co.uk.
As his book(s) on film and editing would suggest, Murch is generous in sharing his insights. That’s true too at a more personal level, as he’s made time to advise and mentor younger, less-experienced filmmakers (as your correspondent can attest).
Apropos Coppola’s characterization of him, Murch is a man of wide interests– to many of which, as reported in “Walter just knows stuff” (source of the image above) and “Transits, Translations, and Secret Patterns: When Lawrence Weschler Met Walter Murch,” he’s made important contributions. Oh, and he’s also a literary translator.
* Walter Murch
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As we juxtapose, we might spare athought for an earlier cinematic pioneer, Hal Roach; he died on this date in 1992. A film and television producer, director and screenwriter, and founder of the namesake Hal Roach Studios, he was active in the industry from the 1910s to the 1990s. He is best known for producing a number of early media franchise successes, including the Laurel and Hardy franchise, Harold Lloyd‘s early films, the films of entertainer Charley Chase, and the Our Gang (AKA, “The Little Rascals”) short film comedy series.
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