Professor Walter Murch has his class mesmerized with a talk about those he deems "The Three Fathers of Cinema." And while the professor really isn't a professor and the class really isn't a class, it seems that way. Because with his eloquent baritone, Murch--the same fellow who has won three Academy Awards for work as both a picture and sound editor (one for Apocalypse Now and an unprecedented two for The English Patient)--is more professorial than any professor most of us have ever encountered.

If we guess Fritz Lang, Carl Dreyer or Josef von Sternberg as the trio of cinematic dads, we're not even close. At what was billed a lecture at the Rafael Film Center last Saturday evening (and the highlight of a four-day tribute), Murch proceeded to make a case for Beethoven, Flaubert and Edison as the sires of motion pictures.

Now the professor throws visual pictures of waveforms on the screen to demonstrate how the 18th-century music of a composer like Joseph Haydn is essentially rooted in architecture with a high degree of form and duplication, whereas Beethoven masters the power of the grand statement.

"He would have none of Haydn's structure of the 1700s," Murch says. "He absorbs nature, shrinking everything down to an insect, then erupting in a grand explosion, all within one movement." According to a French music critic of the early 1800s, "(Beethoven) puts doves and crocodiles together in the same cage." In other words, he introduces us--with his music--to dynamics, and to dramatic unpredictability.

Along with wearing the mantle of professor, Murch is as much a philosopher-artist as he is archetypical sound and picture editor. His mind never stops probing ideas, concepts, the fore and aft of our existence. He has been quoted as saying, "Life is one big pre-lap..." He raises bees and markets honey from his home in Bolinas, coined the term "sound designer," wrote a book on the philosophy of editing (In the Blink of an Eye), restored Touch of Evil according to Orson Welles' notes, and proved one could edit a major motion picture like Cold Mountain with Apple's homegrown software.

But it's the philosopher side of him that, on this night, has everyone convinced the fathers of cinema are not who we might suppose they are. I mean, Gustave Flaubert?? But by the mid-19th century, the French novelist had unsettled the status quo by bringing forth the idea of creatively crafting his stories to reflect the reality he saw each day.

"The notion of doing that was counterintuitive then," Murch says. "But Flaubert (in the writing of Madame Bovary) would triumphantly announce to the world that he wrote four pages today and nothing happened." That may have floated Father Flaubert's boat, but hand in a screenplay like that today and kiss your writing career au revoir.

Following a trial for its obscenity, Madame Bovary became a monster hit as photography was becoming more of an everyday reality. Paintings too, especially Manet's "Olympia"--according to Murch--shook people up because the courtesan in this 1863 work is staring directly out at the viewer. (To be consistent with my roots as any teacher's No. 1 pain-in-the-ass-in-class, I would argue with Prof. Murch that the French salon was already doing this stark realism in 1850, evident in one of Gustave Courbet's most important paintings, "A Burial at Ornans." That canvas, pre-dating Madame Bovary and in a purely visual medium, became the first broad stroke of the realist style--at least according to this pain-in-the-ass.)

In 1889, Edison colleague William Kennedy Dickson, working from Edison's concept, invented the kinetoscope in which silent movies were viewed through a peephole. Dickson also invented the first practical celluloid film for this application and selected 35mm as an appropriate size. Not bad for a non-father of cinema.

Never one to shy from a challenge, Murch was sent a transcription of an 1889 wax cylinder recording of violin music by Dickson, along with 17 seconds of film shot at the same time, and asked to synch it up. Not so easy. The recording, which included voices behind the violin music, was made at an estimated 120 rpms while the film was shot at 46 frames per second. Murch digitized both sound and image, compressed and expanded the sound accordingly, and found synch points through trial and error.

"Edison wasn't able to do it," Murch says, and, after showing it to us, theorized he was the first person to ever see this 17 seconds with the accompanying sound in synch. (The rest of us were Nos. 2 through 385.) "This is the only recording from the 19th century that I know of with people speaking conversationally, without any sort of preparation."

"Things can be invented and fall on sterile ground," Murch says, "if the culture won't allow it to be what it wants to be. We will be looked back on and people will wonder, 'Why didn't they understand that X could be done; why were they so connected to their perversity?'

"There is no reason you won't be able to see film in 20 years, but it will be like riding a 1935 Harley Davidson. There is a lot that is still to happen in the world of digital image and sound, whereas film maybe has one more drop in it."

Sound off on Murch's ideas at letters@pacificsun.com.

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