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Alamy
Released between the Godfathers, Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film was a passion project – and its tale of a surveillance expert disturbed by what he hears hits even harder in 2024.
ver get the feeling you are being watched? How many cameras caught you on your way to work today? How many companies tracked your buying habits on your lunch break? Where is all this information about you going? These may be obviously pertinent questions in the digital age, when 21st-Century technology gives corporations and institutions unprecedented access to our personal information, but they've been the subject of feverish concern for decades. Arguably it was during the 1970s, especially in the US, where the issue of surveillance and privacy really came into public focus for the first time. The decade's political scandals provided such an increase in awareness surrounding these issues that they quickly filtered into popular culture, especially cinema.
Gene Hackman plays a skilled wiretapper – using equipment that was very close to reality (Credit: Alamy)
American New Wave cinema – the movement of young, maverick directors who reshaped the film industry from the mid-1960s – was especially concerned with these themes. From Alan J Pakula's Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974), to Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975), US thrillers gained a paranoid edge. Arguably the most effective and evocative of all these was Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), released 50 years ago this week. The Conversation follows Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a skilled private surveillance expert. He is tasked by a shadowy client, known to him as "the Director" (Robert Duvall), with the difficult job of recording the conversation of a couple walking around the bustling Union Square in San Francisco, meticulously taping what he suspects is an affair.
Francis Ford Coppola with Hackman on set – the film came in the middle of a remarkable period for the director (Credit: Getty Images)
The paranoid climate of the time strong> The US in the early 70s still bore the scars of the political turmoil of the previous decade, one defined by assassinations, riots and an increasing awareness of the technology and techniques deployed by the state's secret services. Cinema had already tapped into the latter phenomenon, with films such as John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964) channelling a growing societal paranoia into thrilling drama.
The Watergate scandal, which ended in Nixon's resignation, made the film seem right on-the-money (Credit: Getty Images)
Yet US cinema of the early 1970s further dialled up such paranoia, supercharged especially by the momentum of the Watergate scandal – the fallout from a 1972 break-in at Democrat Headquarters in the Watergate Building, Washington DC, and the subsequent attempt by the Richard Nixon administration to cover up their involvement. With the revelations that they had been spying on their political opponents using phone-tapping, among other things – information that required thriller-like manoeuvring to uncover by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, eventually dramatised by Pakula in All the President's Men (1976) – the American New Wave became obsessed with the possibilities of this new surveilled US.
The idea of surveillance deployed in homes in such everyday circumstances recalls the final scene in Coppola's film. Caul receives a threatening phone call in which it is revealed that his flat has been bugged. The final scenes show him taking apart the flat in his search for the potential device but to no avail, eventually sitting among the ruins of his room mournfully playing his saxophone. While there's some ambiguity as to whether the bug is be in the saxophone itself, or the whole scene is in fact a delusion, the effect on the character is the same, triggering a breakdown in him. It is not potential surveillance in the pursuit of information; it is surveillance as threat. Yet, would Caul have been that bothered by the same threat in 2024? "It's interesting to see the analogue mechanics of the technology [in the film] and how successful it is," Bolton aptly suggests, "but compared to the level of surveillance that we are all under today it seems primitive and low-key. When we think about the facial recognition systems in shopping centres and the GPS tracking enabled by our phones, we are surveilled to a degree that would be unimaginable to Caul. The Conversation serves to highlight the magnitude of invasiveness that is surveillance, and the possibilities of misinterpretation, and the acquisition by bad actors. These themes could not be more relevant to our current situation."
source: BBC
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