Walter Murch Response

I thought this quote/short article thing was really interesting, especially when I reread it directly after reading the Bela Balazs article for this week. When reading it in class, I completely agreed that it was strange that the first sense we have in life does not stick with us once the other senses come. In many other aspects of our early life, our first impressions do stick. Our young years are said to be the best years to teach children everything from good manners, to multiple languages, to family relations. Even when we get older and become independent, our first experiences and habits tend to stick with us. I would think that spending 4 and a half months in a sack of nastiness that I probably wouldn't want to see anyhow, and having my only relief from what I can only imagine being a crappy period in my life, be the ability to hear everything around me including love from my parents and brothers, that I would not forget that first impression so quickly. Even though I much prefer to have the ability to see, obviously, I felt like the natural path for people to take would be to use sight as an accompaniment to sound, rather than vice versa.

Once I read the Balazs article, I started to understand parts of the question that Murch left unanswered. While Balazs does back up my thought that sight should accompany sound by pointing out that "science tell us in fact that the ear can distinguish more delicate nuances than our eye", he also explains the pitfalls of hearing that does not occur with sight. He explains that while our ears are more perceptive to subtle differences, sounds cannot be isolated from its acoustic environment as, in the context of the article, a close up shot in a film can be isolated from its visual environment.

In relation to the cinema, I absolutely love the sound track of a film. When making a project of my own, the sound effects, voice over and music can change the mood and tone of the film entirely. When I am in a theater I like the sound to be really loud because it is truly what draws me into the visuals of a film. However, it is true that when I leave the theater, I rarely talk about the sound, but about the movie, and therefore the visuals. But my decision on whether the movie was great or terrible is greatly influenced by the sound, even if it is in a more subtle way.