The Conversation Opening Analysis

By Lauren Stewart

About the film The Conversation is a 1974 American psychological thriller film written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The plot revolves around a surveillance expert and the moral dilemma he faces when his recordings reveal a potential murder. Coppola cited the 1966 film Blowup as a key influence. However, since the film was released to theaters just a few months before Richard Nixon resigned as President, he felt that audiences interpreted the film to be a reaction to the Watergate scandal. The film went on to win the Golden Palm as Best Film at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. Now, The Conversation is more timely than ever with the implications of the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 sanctions on our personal privacy and freedom.

Camera Shots

The opening begins with an Surveillance like aerial shot of the location of Union Square in San Francisco to create familiarity of the location to the audience. The distant diegetic sound of orchestral jazz music is audible to heighten the uplifting mood of the overfilled park .

The aerial shot begins to slowly zoom with the diegetic sound of people talking in a vibrant park which seems unpretentious due to no diverse use of camera angles and editing to capture and stimulate the audience attention.

Mise-En-SceneThe camera picks up crowds of office types through a city park and as it zooms in on a crowded park, it picks up the diegetic sounds of voices and sounds from all corners of the park. Zooming in from perhaps a helicopter far above, it begins to pan around and picks out lead character Harry Caul from the crowd and slowly follows him around. This indicates to us the viewers, that he is the Protagonist.

The protagonist is dressed in a grey suit which displays professionalism and could also suggest he is part of a legal profession .The mime continues his act while the man is totally dismissive. Soon the mime gives up on the uninterested man steps out of the frame, leaving the camera to focus until the shot is over.

The opening credits are positioned in the lower right centre of the frame, which directs our vision to focus on opposite side in result to capture all action in a panning motion it is the protagonist who captures the most attention due to the camera following his movements.

The overall sound is conventional until the mark at 1:15 when an obscure screeching sound is present in the opening this disorientates the viewer and reappears throughout the shot.The strange bleeps we heard in the opening shot were sound interference captured from a long-range microphone. It becomes apparent now that the camera slow zoom in the opening shot is a stand in for the microphone, a tool for surveillance which is an evident theme in this film. The orchestral jazz music intensifies the volume as the camera zooms in closer to disorientate the viewer’s perspective of the setting