A review by oldpondnewfrog
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje

4.0

Murch: "[My father] would even stub his cigarettes out in paintings. You can see the fragments of tobacco covered over with oil paint. Or he'd put a painting down and set cans of paint on it, so you see the rings of the cans on the canvas. Or he would stand on a painting, and grid dirt into it. Before he ever started on a painting, the canvas would have to go through a period of abuse. We lived in an old apartment on Riverside Drive in New York, and the long hallway of the apartment was frequently carpeted in unpainted canvases for weeks at a time. The life of the apartment, with cats and people and kids, would just continue. People would be tramping back and forth on the canvases, accidents would happen, things would get spilled on them. Then he would go through them and find the most interesting section of —"

Ondaatje: "Distress."

Murch: "Distress, right! Then he'd put that up on the easel and on top of that he'd paint these realistic still lines. But somehow the ghosts of those random events would work their way into the objects. He called those distress marks "hooks." A canvas for him, without that distress, was a canvas that had no hooks on it and without them the image was in danger of simply sliding off the canvas."