When Walter Murch was newly married, he began working late. Initially it was for a night here and there, but soon it became a regular occurrence. His wife grew alarmed: “Do you have a mistress?” she asked. He paused, then replied, “Yes, and her name is Moviola.”
Murch, the Academy Award–winning film editor and sound designer of The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, American Graffiti, and Cold Mountain, recounts this exchange in the delightful new documentary Her Name Was Moviola. Murch wrote the movie as a love letter to the Moviola editing machine, the industry standard for splicing and cutting film from the 1920s until 1990s, when editing went digital.
Murch recently gave a free screening to his hometown fans at the Calvary Presbyterian Church in Bolinas, California. The event was hosted by the Bolinas Film Festival, as part of its filmmaker series. Murch welcomed the standing-room-only crowd of about 100 people by noting the serendipitous setting: The church was built in 1877, the same year photographer Eadweard Muybridge was developing a high-speed camera that could capture the movement of a galloping horse for railroad tycoon Leland Stanford in Palo Alto, an innovation that laid the foundation for motion pictures.
Directed by Howard Berry, Her Name Was Moviola aims to document the way films were edited prior to the advent of digital tools. Editor Dan Farrell, who previously worked with Murch on titles like The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, joins this filmic archaeological dig.
The first part of the documentary involves the filmmakers tracking down equipment to re-create an analog editing room. After quite a bit of searching, they find a freestanding Moviola on eBay for about $500. (Thirty years ago, a new one would have cost $30,000.) The half-ton machine is complete with a magnetic sound head, viewing screen, pedals, and trim bin. “Thankfully, the top part separates from the legs and pedal section, so I could put it into the back of my car in two pieces,” Berry says.
Another critical item: an Acmade—a desktop device about the size of an old phonograph player with multiple spindles and wheels—needed for stamping time codes along the margin of 35-millimeter film. The machine is listed on eBay for about $160 and described as a “decorative ornament” that could be used “as a lamp.” The documentarians also purchase a separate rewind handle for the cutting bench, a reel stand, and other gear. Film nerds will geek out over the minutiae of these artifacts and the descriptions of the processes that they enable: synching audio to visuals (once recorded on separate reels) and the cutting, inserting, or moving frames around to alter narrative pacing.
After Murch, Farrell, and Berry have assembled an editing room, director Mike Leigh makes an appearance and offers the editors several takes from his 2014 film, Mr. Turner (converted from digital to 35-millimeter film). Murch and Farrell then demonstrate the physical aspects of their work: the taxing routines of pulling and feeding film in and out of various machines, sorting it into waist-high bins like piles of spaghetti, and painstakingly labeling each take of a scene with masking tape and marker to follow a taxonomy that rivals the Dewey decimal system. “Rewinding film is this [mimes the turning of a crank], and it makes a noise. Making an editorial decision is with a brake [presses a foot pedal], and then making a splice is ka-chunk [squeezes his hand]. Each of those makes a sound and involves different parts of your body,” Murch says. “You’re using your feet and both hands. It’s a dance.”
Fortunately for the editors, the shooting of Her Name Was Moviola lasted only 10 days, and they were editing just a couple of scenes of Mr. Turner. “Dan and I are older than we were 40 years ago,” Murch tells me. “For this film, we dove right into the deep end.”
Murch’s love for editing and filmmaking shines brightly throughout the documentary. After the Bolinas screening, he took audience questions and addressed some of the differences between analog and digital methods. For Apocalypse Now (1979), for example, “we had 1.25 million feet of film, which is many, many, many hours. And yet we would have to be able to find a single frame at the bottom of a trim bin,” Murch said. “And so you had to keep these very accurate, kind of Bob Cratchit–style accounting records. But that was pre-computers. It’s just how you had to do it.”
Digital technology, however, eases the labeling and retrieval of different takes while also giving editors more tools. “You can do complex sound mixes, and you do all kinds of visual effects in the process of editing, which in those days we would never do,” Murch tells me. “We would be lucky to be able to have two soundtracks; now you can have 250 soundtracks as you edit.”
Additionally, the lower cost of shooting on digital instead of 35-millimeter means that today’s directors are producing much more footage. “Now, not only will they shoot a lot of film, but they will do resets within a take,” Murch says. “You will get 10 seconds into the scene and a director will say to the actor, ‘Just go back and pick it up from where you put the coffee cup down.’ So the actors have to go [mimes putting a coffee cup down], and they’ll go for another 20 seconds.... I had a scene with 32 of those in a single take.”
According to Murch, the relationship between editor and director can vary widely, regardless of 35-millimeter or digital, or the amount of footage. “Francis Coppola, in my experience, did not spend a lot of time in the editing room. We would screen the film. We would spend two or three days with notes, and then he would take off and say, ‘Do the best you can with these notes, and if you think of anything else, do it. I like to be surprised,’” Murch says. “Kathryn Bigelow, on the other hand, was in the editing room every day from 9 to 5. And you just have to navigate those differences.”
Her Name Was Moviola had its U.S. premiere in August 2024 at the Telluride Film Festival. The film has also screened at California’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival and the Smith Rafael Film Center. Just last week, the film closed out northern Italy’s Pordenone Docs Fest. It is scheduled to be shown at the Watershed Cinema in Bristol, England, in May and Le Cinémathèque Française in Paris in June.
Near the end of the documentary, Murch threads a snippet from Leigh’s Mr. Turner through the Moviola, where it’s seen through the machine’s viewfinder. The sound of the 35-millimeter clip sprocketing along gives way to voice-over. “This is almost certainly the last scene that will ever be edited on a Moviola,” Murch says, declaring the documentary an end to “a century-long chapter.”•
Blaise Zerega is Alta Journal's editorial director. His journalism has appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio (deputy editor and part of founding team), WIRED (managing editor), the New Yorker, Forbes, and other publications. Additionally, he was the editor of Red Herring magazine, once the bible of Silicon Valley. Throughout his career, he has helped lead teams small and large to numerous honors, including multiple National Magazine Awards. He attended the United States Military Academy and New York University and received a Michener Fellowship for fiction from the Texas Center for Writers.
