Walter Murch explores The Rampancy of Golden Ratios across Faces and Screens in conversation with Lawrence Weschler

In his spare time, Walter Murch–the legendary sound and film editor behind such classics as the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient—pursues all manner of marvellous side passions: transposing the uncanny journalism of the Italian midcentury master Curzio Malaparte into English poetry; resurrecting long-abandoned theories of gravitational astroacoustics (subject of Weschler’s recent book, Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists); deciphering the geometry of the Egyptian pyramids; chronicling the art of his eminent painter father, Walter Tandy Murch; and now, approaching his own eightieth year, completing Suddenly Something Clicked, a combination memoir cum successor to his seminal 1995 meditation on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye.

As part of this last project, Murch has been making all sorts of unexpected discoveries, including astonishing observations concerning the way the Golden Ratio φ (1.618…) keeps showing up, not only in spiralling galaxies, DNA, and sunflower pods—but also in the human face itself (anyone’s face, your face). And even more astonishingly, how the faces of actors are regularly but unconsciously placed within the frame by cinematographers according to the Golden Ratio φ — a phenomenon spanning ten decades of cinema history and crossing all cultural boundaries.

Weschler and Murch will try to worry out what to make of all that.