The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola

The point is to draw the listening near inside the situation instead of leaving them realize it from outside, from a distance. You can do this further by falling out the action up into details and cutting from champion to the other, so that each detail is forced in turn on the attention of the audience and reveals its psychological meaning. If you played the whole sentiment straight through, you would lose your power over the audience. They would watch the word-painting without becoming really involved in it, and you would have no means of concentrating their attention on those particular details which chance on them feel what the characters atomic number 18 feeling.

By the uptake of cutting tv camearned run average shots and sound into details, Coppola's narrative certainly makes us feel the paranoia, suspicion, and closing off of the main protagonist, molest Caul, played by Gene Hackman. The first step scene involves two lovers in Union Square in San Francisco. We are given a bird's-eye view of the displace and bustle of the Square, including pedestrians, office workers, a Mime, and street musician's playing "When the inflammation, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along." The Mime imitates passersby, focusing on our unsuspecting protagonist, set upon Caul. We find that Harry is part of a team of surveillance experts who are monitoring the actions and conversation of a young couple, Ann and Mark. though we know nothing else about them, we willingly listen in to their conve

Stanley: Then I range of a function it must be the Internal Revenue. Their tapes always put me to sleep.

The eventual(prenominal) discovery Caul will make is that, though he thought he was directing his own private biography he has been playing along to someone else's tune, much as he plays his saxophone to other people's music until the end where he plays a solo tune knowing he is as much a victim of surveillance as those he monitors. Harry is a tightly-strung, paranoid and extremely private individual. He cannot even disclose the tiniest of details about his personal keep to his girlfriend, which closes him off from human interaction. The film's main theme is how privacy is being eroded by Big Brother via technology.

Filmed during the Watergate era when paranoia and suspicion and surveillance were the watchwords of the day, the film's theme seems even more applicable today in our hi-tech world.

The sound is not the only way in which the narrative draws us into the characters and action. Coppola also uses the television television camera in a unique way in format to add to the themes of surveillance, lack of privacy and voyeurism involved. We see this when Harry returns to his flat. He is a loner who does not like his privacy invaded, though he performs that job daily where other people are concerned. He becomes upset when he learns his landlady used her key to his apartment to leave him a birthday present. However, when Harry enters his apartment the camera does not follow his movements as with typical narrative use of the camera. Instead, much like a video surveillance camera it pans left and right, eventually showing us his position in the couch. Like Harry's job duties, we become a vicarious percipient of the characters and action to the point where we wonder about our own right to pry into the lives of others, something, as Iain Lang (1) points out in his review of the film, Harry will come to see as a incorrupt dilemma "The film's main thrust is a moral one: to what extent does someone have
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