Walter Murch, editor, on the ambiguities of great films.
"...it's a wonderful dilemma: you have to acknowledge that there must be unsolved problems at each stage. As hard as you work, you must have this secret, unspoken hope that one very significant problem will remain unsolved. But you never know what that is until the film is done. You can almost define a film by the problem it poses, that it can't answer itself, that it then asks the audience to solve."
From the book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
Sunday, February 05, 2006
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7 comments:
Nathaniel,
That is one incredible book - Ondaatje, Murch and Minghella - among the finest practitioners in their respective fields. And it's so beautifully presented as well with all those gorgeous stills and snatches of script...
Did he mention that Best Picture nominees without an Editing nomination pretty much never win?
Bye Bye Brokebutt Mounting
anonymous.
it might interest you to know that films with less than 7 nominations (since the birth of the editing category) win best picture EVEN LESS OFTEN than films without best editing nominations.
Thanks to reader Hugo for the statistics.
In other words: Let the Mounting continue...
On the subject of editing, Best Editing matched up with Best Picture only 2/5 this year. 2005 is only the second time in seventeen years that those two categories have matched up as poorly. The correlation between those categories is unusually weak this year.
One wonders whether anonymous wants Brokeback to lose BECAUSE of the editing snub or because it's about gay people. Or perhaps his point is that editing a gay sex scene automatically disqualifies you from getting a nod, and thus disqualifies the film from winning best picture.
It really is weird, though, that they gave Cinderella Man the nod instead of Brokeback or GNaGL... it's not like the latter two had weak editing.
I actually thought the editing in CM was one of its more laudable elements. I'd have punted Crash and Walk the Line for Brokeback and A History of Violence, but that's me. I could make a case for seven or eight films in the Editing category this year. Lots of good work.
Well, can we just call the Best Picture category null and void then, because according to some people (ahem, anonymous) Brokeback can't win Best Picture anymore because it didn't get a Best Editing nomination.
But the only two Best Picture nominated films to got nominated for Editing were Munich and Crash and, wouldn't ya know it, neither of those were nominated for a Best Picture Golden Globe, and that happens even less than a Best Editing/Best Picture thing. Don't it?
So, do I get a prize for even further complicating the matter?
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