Aging & Wisdom Quote by Walter Murch

Murch is doing something editors are trained to do: declare a hierarchy, then quietly reveal the machinery underneath it. He frames each era as having a dominant “eloquent” medium, but “eloquent” here doesn’t mean merely popular or prestigious. It means structurally suited to the way a period thinks, feels, and organizes experience. The 19th century’s symphonies and novels excel at long-form immersion: development, recurrence, interiority, the slow burn of themes returning transformed. That maps neatly onto an age of industrial expansion and bourgeois subjectivity, where time could be narrated and mastered.

Then he pivots to the 20th century and slips in the key phrase: “for various technical and artistic reasons.” That’s the editor’s wink. Film didn’t win because it’s inherently superior; it won because it could metabolize modernity. Mechanical reproduction, mass distribution, photography’s claim to realism, and montage’s ability to fracture and reassemble time made cinema a native language for an era of wars, advertising, cities, psychoanalysis, and speed. Film can jump years in a cut, turn memory into a dissolve, make ideology feel like entertainment. It doesn’t just depict the century; it mimics its cognitive style.

The subtext is also professional self-defense. As an editor, Murch is elevating cinema not as spectacle but as syntax: a medium whose meaning is forged in selection, juxtaposition, rhythm. “Eloquent” becomes an argument for craft. If the novel had sentences and the symphony had movements, the 20th century had edits.