"I think cinema is perhaps now where music was before musical notation - writing music as a sequence of marks on paper - was invented. Music had been a crucial part of human culture for thousands of years, but there had been no way to write it down. Its perpetuation depended on an oral culture, the way literature's did in Homeric days. But when modern musical notation was invented, in the 11th century, it opened up the underlying mathematics of music, and made that mathematics emotionally accessible. You could easily manipulate the musical structure on parchment and it would produce startlingly sophisticated emotional effects when it was played. And this in turn opened up the concept of the polyphony - multiple musical lines playing at the same time...Complex and emotional changes of key became possible across the tonal spectrum. And that unleashed all the music of the late 18th and the 19th centuries... I like to think cinema is stumbling around in the "pre-notation" phase of its history...Whether we will ever be able to write anything like cinematic notation, I don't know. But it's interesting to think about."
Film editor Walter Murch in conversation with Michael Ondaatje