An enjoyable love letter to the world of analogue and the past of film editing, Howard Berry’s Her Name Was Moviola is a joy for lovers of film history. Berry has made what should be a very niche documentary as accessible as possible to anyone who has an interest in film—an utter pleasure of a watch.

Invented in 1922, the Moviola remained for a long time the dominant machine for editing films in English-language cinema. Mastering it allowed an editor, in tandem with the director and producer, to create a language and rhythm within a film. Sound and film editor Walter Murch attempts with a team to rebuild a Moviola editing suite to take us through the process of how a film was pieced together.

In the world of digital filmmaking and even now, with whole films being made on a computer, the physical aspect of the back end of film production has been slowly pushed to the side. Sure, there are a few filmmakers who utilise actual shoot their film on film, but they are getting fewer and farther in between for a variety of reasons that are best left for another time. That makes Her Name Was Moviola as niche a watch as you could imagine. Not only is it for film lovers, but it is also for film historians and those who adore the technical side of cinema. Its target audience range is not one that stretches too far, yet goodness, this is a wonderful and informative watch.

As someone who worked in a cinema and would watch in awe at the few proper projectionists left in the country at the time, work with film as they pieced reels together to make someone’s film presentable for showing, Her Name Was Moviola, is an utter treat of a documentary, watching a film strip of a take get prepped, marked and logged and then the same again with the sound reel shows just how convoluted the process of getting a piece of film ready just to BEGIN editing. It’s a labour of love, and to have this all shown in perfect detail is a dream. That is before we even see how it is all fed through the machine. It is so fantastically technical that you get lost in what you witness.

It helps that with a documentary subject that could be seen as very technical and well, boring, that director and editor Howard Berry does his utmost best to keep his audience invested. Be it with the way he presents his montages of the process in a light and almost interactive manner, you become drawn to it, and by doing so, it allows for Her Name Was Moviola to flow remarkably well in its necessarily short 68-minute runtime. Including a bouncy score makes Berry’s film a viewing pleasure.

Walter Murch and Dan Farrell guide us through this process as they piece together their version of a scene from Mike Leigh’s film Mr Turner. They bounce off one another very well, allowing their actions to do more of the talking for them.

As said earlier, we are shown in exquisite detail the process it took to cut just a take of a film. It could have been so easy to make this a general education tool about the history of the machine and all that it took to make it all work. But, as with all good resources, the best way to teach how something worked is to show it. We get that here, and that choice is what truly makes the documentary work as well as it does.

There is something oddly romantic as a film lover; in seeing the entire process, you think back to films that were made this way, and it brings a greater appreciation for the work now. That is the power of Her Name Was Moviola; it brings back those memories and causes you to smile from ear to ear as you get swept away in all the film stock.

★★★★

For more coverage of Sheffield Doc Fest 2024, please check out the reviews below.

Black Snow

Britain’s Forgotten Prisoners

Plastic People

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