Walter Murch on Welles and sound design

[Tony]

Here are some excerpts from an interview with Walter Murch, done by Michael Jarrett, associate professor of English at the York Campus of Penn State University, author of Sound Tracks: A Musical ABC, Vols. 1-3 (Temple UP, 1998).

If you're interested in Murch, you should check out "The Conversations", the book of interviews of Murch done by Michael Ondaatje (Vintage, 2002), which features a large section on the reconstruction of Touch of Evil. Murch gets my vote to work with Mauro Bonanni on the re-creation of Don Quixote:


Jarrett: The following interview concentrates, not on Murch the picture editor, but on Murch the sound designer. For once, the eyes don't have it, and the term "soundtrack" is meant literally. It refers to every sound—to the collage of voices, noises, and music—that a movie-going audience hears coming through speakers, not just to a potentially marketable collection of music isolated from the film it accompanied.

Murch cares about soundtracks, so it's hardly surprising, then, that he ended up remixing and re-editing Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). Welles, more than any other director before him, employed sound—to evoke cinematic worlds, establish mood, and raise goosebumps. For example, in Citizen Kane, the audio montage that condenses Susan Kane's singing career into a dizzying burst of music and noise anticipates "Tomorrow Never Knows," the Beatles at their experimental best. And as for the opening sequence to Touch of Evil? Now that Murch has replaced Henry Mancini's studio-mandated mambo with the audio-vérité track that Welles originally designed, it recalls nothing so much as musique concrète (Pierre Henry) or electronica (Josh Davis/DJ Shadow)—or, yes, the soundtrack to American Graffiti. Indeed, the newly realized Touch of Evil—for 40 years a virtual movie, a movie that Welles hoped against hope Universal would edit and distribute—might register most forcefully with a contemporary audience schooled on films, such as American Graffiti, that Murch edited and mixed. We've learned to see and hear the film that Welles intended.

In short, Murch stands as an important figure in cinema because he and a handful of peers realized possibilities offered by multi-track recording. (Or in materialist terms, the development of multi-track recording technology significantly broadened options available during postproduction, creating a niche for Murch and his peers to fill. It was, thus, crucial to the outpouring of independent films in the late '60s and '70s.) For while the possibilities of editing and mixing sounds had been glimpsed early on—long before the arrival of the talkies—they remained largely inaudible until magnetic tape emerged as an economically viable and practical recording medium. Tape made sound malleable, much like celluloid made visual images malleable. And that exposes an anomaly. If we want to understand the history of edited images we start by looking to the films of Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin. To understand the history of edited sound, we do well to listen to Murch's work with Lucas and Coppola.

MICHAEL JARRETT: Has film sound led us to hear the world differently?

WALTER MURCH: Yes . . . sure. I hesitate only because Welles was doing the same kind of thing with radio back in the 1930s. Then he continued to innovate when he got into film. If you listen to many of his films, including Touch of Evil, if you don’t watch the picture, you hear the sort of things that he was doing on radio, both with dialogue and sound.

Never before in history, before the invention of recorded sound, had people possessed the ability to manipulate sound the way they’d manipulated color or shapes. We were limited to manipulating sound in music, which is a highly abstract medium. But with recorded material you can manipulate sound effects—the sound of the world—to great effect. In the same way that painting, or looking at paintings, makes you see the world in a different way, listening to interestingly arranged sounds makes you hear differently.

Jarrett: Sound came to film in the late ‘20s, but when it arrived, it anticipated the even later arrival of tape.

Murch: That’s very true. Whenever you work in film, you’re working with tape. It just happens to be tape with sprockets on it.

Jarrett: Touch of Evil recalls themes and approaches developed in your own work—the theme of surveillance, the use of source materials. Was working on it something like gazing into a mirror?

Murch: In a way, yes. It wasn’t a film with which I was intimately familiar before I began work on its restoration. I’d seen it a couple of times, but I hadn’t studied it the way some people have, on a frame-by-frame basis. Obviously, when you do a restoration, you really have to get down with the film on a very deep, technical level. But yes, I’d done work on The Conversation, which was all about surveillance, and American Graffiti, which was all about the creative use of source music. Welles had anticipated both of those things in Touch of Evil.

Jarrett: So Welles was less a direct influence than you both followed the logic inherent in recording technologies.

Murch: : Once you take sound seriously—you think, "How can we use it to the best effect?"—it’s almost inevitable that you’ll start coming to the same conclusions as somebody else who was thinking along the same lines. I’d seen Touch of Evil. Who knows how subconsciously it influenced what I did.

Jarrett: Are there people in film, besides Welles, that you regard as anticipating later accomplishments with magnetic tape?

Murch: Certainly Murray Spivak, who was one of the premier and earliest sound editors. He worked on King Kong. You'll find the most creative use of sound in films like King Kong or in Warner Brothers' cartoons of the '30s and '40s—and Disney to a certain extent. They weren't limited by reality, and so they recorded interesting, fantastic sounds and, then, arranged and combined them in interesting ways—more so than features. Features were late in developing that sensibility. I grew up on Warner Brothers' cartoons. When I was five or six, I felt that they were fantastic. They laid down a very rich bed of information that I became aware of only much later.

Jarrett: By all accounts the division of labor at RKO, where King Kong was made, and at Warner Brothers, with Tex Avery, Raymond Scott, and Chuck Jones, wasn't as strict as elsewhere. Ideas could circulate.

Murch: Exactly. Remember that sound alone, just the fact that there was sound at all, was a huge thing in the '30s—for ten years. We've had Dolby sound in theaters for almost double that amount of time. You can imagine the sense of accomplishment in getting any sound at all and, then, to investigate stories with spoken word and a certain amount of sound effects? Plus, it was a corporate world in the sense that there were very few independent motion pictures, and those that there were made had tiny budgets. Sound was expensive; they couldn't do much inventive work on that level. The push had to come from the director—somebody like Hitchcock or Welles—who said, "I am interested in sound." Otherwise, the tendency was to do a journeyman-like job and not spend too much money because they'd already jumped over the post so to speak, since there was sound to begin with. The really creative use of sound was something that took time. But there are many exceptions to that rule. Renoir, for example, claimed to be the first person to record a toilet flush and put it in a movie. He strung a microphone from the studio's sound department to a toilet, flushed the toilet, recorded it, and put it in a film he directed in the very early '30s.

Jarrett: Taking an example from your own work, when you edited sound on American Graffiti, did you have an entire radio show recorded that you could reference as needed?

Murch: Yes. When I was mixing the film, I had three tracks to draw from. One of them was what you might call the "dry studio track" of a radio show that George had created with Wolfman Jack, where the music was very clear and sharp and everything was in audio focus. Then there were two other tracks which were staggered a couple of frames to each other, and on which the axis of the microphone and the speakers was never the same because we couldn't remember what we had done intentionally. Sometimes, Wolfman Jack would be on axis on one track, but he would be off axis on the other track. I was able to blend those three tracks to get the right amount of atmosphere. I could make transitions from a live, very present sound to something that sounded like it was very distant and bouncing off many buildings. I could create a sense of movement too—hence, the moving microphones.

This is what I discovered Welles had done in a more primitive form in Touch of Evil. What he had not done was combine the original recording and the atmospheric recording. He simply positioned a microphone, static in an alleyway outside Universal Sound Studios, re-recording from a speaker to the microphone through the alleyway. He didn't have control over the balance of dry sound versus reflected sound, and he didn't have the sense of motion that we got from moving the speaker and moving the microphone relative to one another. This creates the sonic equivalent of depth of field in photography. We can still have the music in the background, but because it's so diffuse, you can't find edges to focus on and, therefore, the dialogue which is in the foreground and which is in focus is clearly what you're supposed to be listening to. That was the defect of all previous systems, except for Welles's system. In them the music was just filtered and played low, but it still had its edges, and, therefore, it became hard for the mind to separate out the edges of the music versus the edges of the dialogue. We came up with a way of taking music that might, at one point, be fully in the foreground—in focus and loud—and, then, during a scene transition, sent way into the background and thrown out of focus so that people could talk in the foreground in dialogue and not have you driven mad. No other film before that one had had 42 songs back to back. They would have maybe three or four, five or six at most, scattered throughout the film.

Jarrett: The sonic space that's created in American Graffiti really gets opened up in Apocalypse Now.

Murch: American Graffiti was in mono. Apocalypse Now was my first stereo film. All of the films I'd worked on up until that point were mono. So I jumped with both feet into the fire, not only doing a stereo film but doing the first dramatic quadraphonic film: with it, the audience gets a sense of being surrounded by sound. There are sound sources in back and in front of us.

Jarrett: You’ve written that you were led to a career in sound design by hearing Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète. It’s striking to note similarities between Schaeffer’s compositions and the sound of Welless’ films.

Murch: A lot of what Welles did in Citizen Kane and what he’d done earlier on radio is a kind of musique concrète. Schaeffer’s innovation was to apply the then-new technology of magnetic tape to recording and assembling sound, and, then, to give performances in musical venues and call it musique concrète—concrete, as opposed to abstract, music. Nobody had done that before. It was a big revelation. But if you listened to what was produced for films and to much of what was done on the radio by innovators such as Welles, it was the same kind of thing.

Jarrett: In your book—In the Blink of an Eye—you outline six rules for editing images. Are there comparable rules for editing sound?

Murch: You have more freedom with sound than you do with picture. There are, consequently, fewer rules. But the big three things- which are emotion, story, and rhythm—apply to sound just as much as they apply to picture. You are always primarily looking for something that will underline or emphasize or counterpoint the emotion that you want to elicit from the audience. You can do that through sound just as well as through editing, if not more so. Rhythm is obviously important; sound is a temporal medium. And then story. You choose sounds that help people to feel the story of what you’re doing.

Jarrett: Basically, you’re saying that audiences should be able to work with sound in a manner similar to the way Eisenstein said they should be able to puzzle out the meaning of edited images.

Murch: That’s the key to all film for me—both editorial and sound. You provoke the audience to complete a circle of which you’ve only drawn a part. Each person being unique, they will complete that in their own way. When they have done that, the wonderful part of it is that they re-project that completion onto the film. They actually are seeing a film that they are, in part, creating: both in terms of juxtaposition of images and, then, juxtaposition of sound versus image and, then, image following sound, and all kinds of those variations.

I always try to be metaphoric as much as I can and not to be literal. When you’re presented with something that doesn’t quite resolve on a normal level, that’s what makes the audience go deeper.

Jarrett: Are there movies that you would just as soon hear as view?

Murch: It’s the interaction between sound and image that I like. Although as I did mention, it’s an interesting experiment to turn off Touch of Evil, the picture, and just listen to the sound. I’m sure the same would be true with Citizen Kane although I’ve never done that. I see very few films myself. I'm not a film buff.

Jarrett: Your response to environmental sounds recalls the recommendations of John Cage.

Murch: I was a big fan of John Cage in my teenage years.

Jarrett: What are your feelings about nondiegetic music? If you could always exercise your will, would you use it?

Murch: Do you mean ordinary film music? I generally think music is used too much. But the general principle, for me anyway, is that although music is an effective rallier of emotions—it can provoke emotions in people—it’s best used in film as something that directs or channels emotions that are already present. If a film becomes too dependent on music to create the emotion, there’s a kind of steroid-like artificiality that comes into play. The audience, without knowing it, begins to feel manipulated. "They want me to feel sad, so they play sad music." What I’d much rather have happen is that the scene itself—and that scene from Godfather is a perfect example because it provokes an emotion—I’d rather, when music comes in, that it tell the audience where to channel that emotion—what twist to put on that emotion. Is it a safe emotion? Is it a heroic emotion? Is it an uncertain emotion? Or any word you care to apply to them. That's when music, to me, is most effective. The Godfather overall is a film that could be used as the textbook for that sort of use of music. And, Welles, too, did the same sort of thing.

Here's another interview with Murch and an article by him, specifically on TOE:

http://www.filmsound.org/murch/evil/

http://www.reelclassics.com/Articles/Films/touchofevil-article.htm

And here's an audio interview; go to the 8 minute mark to get to Welles:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1113445

[Glenn Anders]

Thanks, Tony.

I don't know if Walter Murch adds too much here to what we already know about Welles' mastery of sound concepts, but he is certainly valuable in our corner because he know how to make sound work in films, yesterday, today, and probably, tomorrow.

What Welles understood in Radio about sound is what he brought to Hollywood, the idea that is today called, the Sound Stage. Space represents emotion both visually and aurally.

The sound technician knew that, I'm sure, but the executives hadn't figured it out yet, or at least, they didn't want to pay for it.

Glenn

[Phil Rosenthal]

I've listened to Citizen Kane several times, on long car trips (an audio tape I had made of the entire film), and it was almost as good as watching it. There's so much going on with overlapping dialog, sound effects and music, it really draws you in. I did the same thing with some classic Woody Allen movies (Manhattan, Stardust Memories), and they are equally effective as audio only.

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, Phil, years ago, using a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and editing with appropriate balance, I made what was a very good radio play out of CITIZEN KANE. It came in at about an hour.

If you could find an old tape recorder, you could do it yourself. All it takes is scissors, editing tape, and patience. Almost like film editing, but more simple and (at one time, at least) less expensive.

The visuals take up an amazing amount of time in any movie, which I imagine is what kids complain about in old films. They are used to swift cutting rhythms, images in the brain almost before they've hit the retina.

Glenn

[Phil Rosenthal]

Very interesting, Glenn. Yes, that was the problem when I listened to those tapes - the sections where the visual took over more of the movie. I'd have to try to remember what was happening at those points. Your radio play version sounds like the solution.

[Tony]

I have an Lp from the 70s which is the entire soundtrack of Kane on 2 discs which always made for fascinating listening; I kept waiting for Ambersons, but it never arrived. I can't think of another picture this was ever done for: "radio with Pictures" indeed. Truffaut, in his introduction to the 78 Rosenbaum translation of Bazin's book, says: "...independently of the great visual pleasures they afford us, Orson Welles's films make marvelous radio broadcasts; I have verified this by recording all of them on cassettes, which I listen to in my bathroom with ever renewed delight."

And in the documentary "Rosabella", the director/narrator Gianfranco Giagni recalls how when he was a teenager "...kids in my neighbourhood knew all of Lady From Shanghai from heart; they'd ride around town, drinking beer and listening to it on tape. Everybody played a different part: Michael O'Hara, Bannister, Grisby and of course there was Elsa."

It seems generations have made audio tapes of Welles's films; what other director can this be said about?

[Glenn Anders]

Good to be in the company of Traufaut, but it would have been dangerous to haul my huge Webcor into the bathroom.

Given the Italians' love of Comedia del Arte projects, Tony, and their fascination with Movies, generations may have made admired directors their own. It would be nice if the American young were drawn to such cutting edge quality in Media.

I must look out "Rosabela." It seems to have no end of interesting anecdotes recorded.

Glenn

[Tony]

Glenn:
Rosabella is amazing: it's got my vote for the best doc on Welles- ever. It covers his Italian experience, but it limits itself to people who actually knew Welles, and actually worked with him; you'll notice that the books on Welles that are very postive are usually written by people who knew him, who aren't making moral judgements. That's why later books have often been very critical: they weren't there. Rosabella avoids this problem.

It's also got interviews with Bonnani, Troiani and Lavagnino!!!

A must have. :;):

[Glenn Anders]

Thank you, Tony. I'll save my pennies.

Glenn