The Conversation
Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1974. The post-revolutionary paranoia of the early 1970s suffuses The Conversation . Even so, Coppola depoliticizes this thriller, removing action, character and history by going over the same tape again and again, in an aural, Watergate-era version of Blow-Up . Gene Hackman, as a professional wiretapper, plays a self-consciously anonymous man at the top of a clandestine profession in which no moment between human beings cannot be recorded. He becomes unglued once he takes an interest in a story beyond its audio quality. Part of the series Visions of a City, Or A Weekend in San Francisco. Screening on film.