Walter Murch and the sound and editing.

Walter Murch played a very important part in the making of The Conversation, the most important part he had played so far in his career. The film could be seen as quite the bench mark for him because this is when he started editing the visual as well as the sound and after this point this has become something he is known for. Walter Murch has also famously worked on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, The English Patient and Cold Mountain to name but a short list.

Because his role in The Conversation was so important and sound itself was so important, I wanted to see what he may have commented on the film. His interviews were actually very useful. He reinforced some of  the themes I mentioned in my previous post such as Harry Caul being wrapped in plastic or there being something like a caul separating him from the rest of the world, especially at times when he feels harm near him. Murch also emphasised certain important factors of the film that I have not yet considered, such as the degree to which this film is a character study as much as a suspense story and that one of the ways that the film works is that Harry Caul is made as honestly human as possible for the audience, separating him from Hackman’s previous roles that would not bat an eye at the sight of a murder.

A very interesting aspect of The Conversation, especially in regards to sound and sound editing, is that there is not much in the way of dialogue in the last and most tense section of the film (after the party that follows the convention). What we do hear is of course the repetition of the recording several times. Apart from this, Harry Caul does not have any real conversations with anyone. This is very fitting for the story of such a lonely man yet interesting next to the film title. Every other noise consequently becomes a lot more important and poignant, like the way we hear the recorded conversation in new contexts such as through the door of the director’s office then in the director’s office. As Caul listens through the door, the woman in the recording sounds very very vulnerable. When we enter the office, we get a sense of the relationship between the couple and how intense they seem as the woman’s husband listens to them. There is a particularly nice moment of how the sound is edited to fit with the visual just as Harry Caul leaves in the elevator. In the background we hear the music from the musicians in the park on the day of the recording. Then as Harry Caul leaves and his anxiety grows, the percussive music gets louder and louder and builds and builds. It fits perfectly with his mental state and actions.

The technology Murch employed for the sound recording was quite cutting edge for the early 1970s. He decided that it would sound more realistic for there to be digital noise and algorithms instead of just static in the parts of the recording which were unclear. To get the right sound he employed techniques such as feeding the actors’ voices through an Arp synthesiser. It definitely makes the gaps in the recording sound a lot more interesting because we get more of an impression that we are missing out on something important than we would have done with simple radio static which we are all much more used to hearing.

 

References

http://www.filmsound.org/murch/parnassus/ accessed on 11/11/2010

http://filmsound.org/murch/waltermurch.htm accessed on 11/11/2010

http://www2.yk.psu.edu/~jmj3/murchfq.htm accessed on 11/11/2010

http://www.till.com/articles/arp/ accessed on 11/11/2010