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Walter Scott Murch (b. 1943) is widely recognised as one of the leading authorities in the field of film editing, as well as one of the few film editors equally active in both picture and sound. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2016]

TRANSCRIPT: [William Kennedy] Dickson, because of his visionary elements, clashed with Edison, and they separated a couple of years after this experiment with the violin, because Edison didn't believe in projection. He believed in one man, one machine. That you should sell a machine, and one person would put five cents or whatever, and look at it. That way, you could sell more equipment and more film. The idea of a room with one projector and one piece of film, showing to 400 people – Edison saw money going out the door. 'I could have sold 400 machines.' And so he didn't like projection, and Dickson did, he saw that. And he split and was one of the founders of... I will get it in a second, it just flew out of my head. The studio [Biograph] that eventually became the studio where D.W. Griffith worked. And Dickson, I think, was somebody who hired D.W. Griffith to be his cameraman, or actor or something, early on in his career.

And at the same time that this was happening, the Lumière brothers were inventing film, their own version of it. And strangely, they didn't see a future for film. They thought it was something like a hula hoop, that would interest people for a while and it might have some archival value. But eventually people are going to get tired of trains arriving at stations, because they can go to the station and see the train arrive for themselves. They were not visionaries in that sense, they were camera manufacturers. That was... The Lumière factory was where they made cameras. So they looked at it from a more technical point of view, compared to Dickson.

And I ran across this book which has been reprinted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it's written by Dickson and made in 1895, so just a year after the violin experiment. And it's called 'The History of the Kinetograph'. In other words, the history of movies, written just a few years after the invention of movies, but incredibly valuable from that point of view. But toward the end, he's talking about the future of cinema, and I'll just quote from one thing. He says, 'Not only our own resources – meaning humanity – not only our own resources of the entire world will be at our command. Nay, we may even anticipate the time when sociable relations will be established between ourselves and the planetary system. And when the latest doings on Mars will be recorded by enterprising kinetographic reporters.' Well, he's right, it happened. You know, we have cameras on Mars telling us what's happening on Mars. And he predicted films with naval battles and conflict and sound and colour, and essentially, even though he didn't talk about it, he predicted editing. Because what he's talking about is impossible without editing. And motion pictures were not invented with editing. The initial pictures were very much like kind of images you see today on YouTube for the most part. These single-shot versions of cat videos. Here's a cat doing a funny thing. Edison's version is, 'Here's a man kissing a woman, or here's a man sneezing. Isn't that amazing?' Yes, it is. But the idea that you could take fragments of images and weave them together into a tapestry that would imaginatively provide a continuity was something that did not occur to anybody for certainly 10-12 years.

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