M as in Murch

The text follows Michel Chion’s thought that, as a sound art, film is a palimpsestic art: sound film perfected the rich research of audiovisual relations in silent film and the first decades of sound film. An example of a contemporary treatment and the aesthetical image of sound and music in film can be found in the research that sound designer and editor Walter Murch conducted in the films that Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas made before the arrival of dolby stereo technology. The Conversation (1974) and American Graffiti (1973) each in its own way stress the new role of a sound designer: in The Conversation, Murch took spoken and recorded words as the basis of musical variations, while in American Graffiti he used special spatial/sound editing of background music consisting of a series of rock’n’roll songs to achieve the effect of reality. Both films are also an allegory of music, jazz, a jazz musician and rock’n’roll as the soundtrack of everyday life.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!