i know you - hearing:seeing the conversation

John BolesMay 8, 2013

I Know You: Hearing/Seeing The Conversation

“For as far back in human history as you would care to go, sounds…seemed to be the inevitable and ‘accidental’ (and therefore mostly ignored) accompaniment of the visual—stuck like a shadow to the object that caused them. And, like a shadow, they appeared to be completely explained by reference to the objects that gave them birth: a metallic clang was always ‘cast’ by the hammer, just as the smell of baking always came from a loaf of fresh bread. Recording magically lifted the shadow away from the object and stood it on its own, giving it a miraculous and sometimes frightening substantiality.” – Walter Murch (Chion xvi)

AUDIO AND FILM

The advent of sound in film marked the beginning of a process by which the visual

was to be completely reworked in light of its new accompaniment. That process, though,

was a lengthy evolution fraught with tension, and it continues to this day. In the earliest

sound films, audio was relegated to a functional role, serving the image’s needs rather than

establishing its own unique and influential identity. As Michel Chion put it in his book

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, “The point was to give viewers something clear and distinct.

Noises and music, for their part, needed to be as stereotyped as possible” (148). This

concrete aural objective was necessitated in some part by recording technologies available in

the early 20th century; an inability to capture dense sound environments and a lack of audio

clarity forced filmmakers to focus on the voice at the expense of all other sounds if the

dialogue was to be heard and understood. Technological advances made it possible “to

produce sounds other than conventionally coded ones, sounds that could have their own

materiality and density, presence and sensuality,” but “in fact, most filmmakers continued to

rely on the same dry and impersonal noises as before” (Chion 148).

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The improvements were gradually embraced as a tool for conveying environmental

space and for layering several audio tracks which complemented or conflicted with one

another. The increasing possibilities and nuance of sound design, particularly facilitated by a

greater level of audio detail in higher frequencies, had a profound effect on the visual

structure of cinema. Enhanced discernment of sound elements “induced a rapid perception of

what was onscreen (for vision relies heavily on hearing). This evolution consequently

favored a cinematic rhythm composed of multiple fleeting sensations, of collisions and

spasmodic events, instead of a continuous, homogenous flow of events” (Chion 149). The

unique sensory link between sound and visual comprehension made it possible to show

disjointed visuals that would be united and made clear by sound. This also aided visual

memory: music and effects (as well as dialogue in its most commonly used form) that

directly correlate to images onscreen help those images “impress themselves well in the

mind” (Chion 149). Since recording technology enabled more complex, realistic film sound,

audiences have come to depend on sound to compensate for and stabilize the “hypertense

rhythm and speed of much current cinema” (Chion 149).

The Conversation (1974), directed by Francis Ford Coppola and with sound editing

by Walter Murch, deliberately resists using audio in this way. The filmmakers overturn

audio-visual conventions with a complex, disturbing sound environment that misleads both

the viewer and the protagonist, bugging expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), in their quest to

uncover the hidden meaning of a set of recorded tapes Harry made for an older man (Robert

Duvall) suspicious of his youthful wife (Cindy Williams). Sound in the film is a frequent

source of discomfort and confusion, teasing and frightening Harry with its ambiguity and

frustrating the viewer who seeks narrative coherence in the film’s audio elements. In a

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mysterious dream sequence, Harry identifies the traditional role of sound in film when he

calls out to the wife he bugged, “You don’t know who I am, but I know you.” For Harry, and

for the film viewer, to hear is to know. The Conversation manipulates this perspective to its

advantage: Harry’s failure—and, through him, the viewer’s failure—to comprehend the true

meaning of his audio recordings brings about his ultimate downfall.

This essay will examine the diverse audio-visual techniques used in The

Conversation, both conventional and idiosyncratic, and their role in determining viewer

comprehension and interpretation. I will begin with an elaboration of the context within

which the film was made, with particular focus on the technological and social environment

that inspired and influenced Coppola’s work. This will be followed by an analysis of the

film’s audio informed by Chion’s theories and organized under three broad categories:

structure, exposition, and consciousness. I will conclude with some thoughts on how The

Conversation’s undermining of audio’s traditional role in cinema exposes the nature of that

role and the unacknowledged dependency that it creates.

RECORDING THE CONVERSATION

In 1966, Coppola had a conversation with director Irvin Kershner, in which they

discussed bugging techniques. Kershner remarked that, for a long time, the safest way to

avoid bugging was to walk in a crowd of people, but that new technological inventions made

it possible to use targeted microphones with gunsights to pick out individual voices. Coppola

visualized this concept, imagining a scene where a conversation between two people

recorded from afar would fluctuate as they moved and disappear whenever something or

someone came between them and the camera. This, of course, became the opening scene of

The Conversation, though his inspiration for the film began before that and came from a

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variety of sources. As a child, Coppola had dreamed of installing microphones throughout

his house for the purpose of discovering what Christmas presents he would receive.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) explored themes of technological analysis and

dependence that would become central to Coppola’s script, and a Life article on bugging

expert Bernard Spindell gave Coppola an introductory understanding of the life and

techniques of those working in the field.

In the years before filming The Conversation, Coppola also expressed a growing

distaste for cinematic narrative and technical conventions:

“There’s no real difference between The Godfather, The Exorcist, or American Graffiti. They are done in the same way: actors are instructed to ‘play a role’ on an invisible stage in front of cameras, the film is shot in shattered fragments and their performance doesn’t jell until the editing is done. These routines haven’t changed in decades and I’m bored by them” (Schumacher 135-6).

As a film director, his work on the 1973 opera The Visit of the Old Lady offered the

opportunity “to compensate for some of the opera’s shortcomings by making the

presentation visually interesting” (Schumacher 141). The Conversation offered a similar

opportunity in reverse, a chance to reexamine his filming habits and the interplay of

visuals, audio, and actor performances in his films. Indeed, some even argue that the film

was made only for that reason: “Coppola never found a strong story; what he found

instead, with the help of Walter Murch, was a structuralist concept” (Goodwin 146).

Coppola acknowledged the importance of the sound structures Murch created, claiming

that “a lot of [the film] is due to [Murch’s] ability…Walter was much more than your

average editor—he was a full collaborator on the project. Walter is an author of [The

Conversation]” (Goodwin 158).

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The film was organized primarily around its audio, rather than its visuals. The

original script was vague and lacked the final product’s climactic murder sequence; it

was a character study on the role of sound in the life of one man that became a thriller

during the production process. “Somewhere along the line,” Coppola said, “I got the idea

of using repetition, of exposing new levels of information not through exposition but by

repetition” (Goodin 146). Both director and sound editor approached the film as a fluid

entity, inventing recording technologies that did not exist for the sake of accenting the

larger themes, reediting many times to play the muddled visual and audio elements off of

each other in new and surprising ways, and refusing to provide the sort of narrative

coherence or closure which was (and is) expected of film. Coppola remarked, “I am

deliberately trying to not unveil [the] characters in a conventional way. I’m trying to give

you an impression of their characters. The only film on [the bugged couple] is the same

dumb conversation. I’m just showing you the same moment over and over” (Goodwin

172). He also lamented the critical responses to those innovative techniques: “The

second I do it, someone says it’s skimpy” (Goodwin 172).

One month before the Watergate break-in, and nine months before that story went

public, Coppola remarked, “The movie will say something significant about the

nightmarish situation that has developed in our society, a system that employs all the

sophisticated electronic tools that are available to intrude upon our private lives”

(Goodwin 172). The eerie prescience of his comments reflected the social anxieties of

the time, which manifest in Harry’s eventual transition from enactor to object of

surveillance, but their relevance has only grown over time as new digital technologies

provide unprecedented and ever increasing access to private lives and data. These

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mounting concerns seem to have served as motivation for the vehement rejection of audio

coherence in The Conversation, the story of the disintegrating mind of a man whose

professional purpose is to capture and render intelligible the personal and the hidden.

STRUCTURE

The first category of sound use in The Conversation that I will explore is

structure, or those instances in which the placement of sound events has a noticeable

impact on visual editing, scene transitions, dialogue flow, and other technical visual and

aural methods. The most prominent of these Chion names the “acousmêtre,” “the voice

that speaks over the image but is also forever on the verge of appearing in it” (129). The

acousmêtre “has the power of seeing all; second, the power of omniscience; and third, the

omnipotence to act on the situation…[and] in many cases there is also a gift of ubiquity

(129-30). The frequently repeated audio recording around which the plot of The

Conversation revolves, especially the all-important line, “He’d kill us if he got the

chance,” represents a perverse manipulation of the acousmêtre’s role, or what Chion calls

the “paradoxical acousmêtre”: one that is “deprived of some powers,” the lack of which

“is the very thing that makes them special” (130).

The acousmêtre traditionally takes on one of two roles: it either serves as a

mysterious being empowered by its lack of visual representation and then stripped of

those powers when it is eventually revealed, or, as a narrator who is somehow external to

the visual narrative and capable of understanding and commenting on the events taking

place. The recorded conversation between the couple in The Conversation occupies an

ambiguous place between these two roles. While the couple is visualized from the very

start of the film, a presence that would normally undermine their ability to take on the

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function of the acousmêtre, the subsequent replays of the audio recording allow them still

to adopt that function. The couple is able to transcend their strictly narrative role,

becoming in addition an omnipresent, disembodied, and extra-narrative force.

This is evidenced by the consistent interjection of lines from the recording

between and in response to lines of dialogue. While Harry lies in bed with Meredith

(Elizabeth MacRae), who has come to steal the tapes from his apartment, he worries

about the consequences of his work, saying, “I have to destroy the tapes, I can’t let it

happen again,” to which the tape responds, “Oh please, don’t.” Meredith caresses

Harry’s face, but it is the recording that seduces him with an “I love you.” When Harry

confronts the man that hired him, asking what will happen to the unfaithful wife, the

recording gives him the answer he dreads: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” In the

panicked moments before the murder, as Harry struggles with his guilt, he hears the tapes

revealing the affair in the adjacent hotel room, followed by screams and emphasizing

Harry’s complicity in the unfolding events. At the end of the film, as Harry visually

recreates the murder scene, the recorded man notes, “He [Harry’s dead employer] doesn’t

need anything anymore,” solidifying Harry’s realization that he has been misinterpreting

the tapes all along.

In these and other instances, the recorded conversation assumes the responsibility

of the acousmêtre, but with none of the authority or clarity that are ascribed to that role

by definition. Harry’s analysis of the couple’s dialogue, in the form of these interjected

fragments engaging with his daily life and conversations, leads him directly toward a

disastrous misunderstanding of the conversation’s significance. The voices trick him and

the viewer into believing that they have some access to the truth of the situation. Even

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when the mystery has supposedly been solved, though, they still fail to satisfy their

“acousmatic” duties. For if the couple were planning a murder at the hotel, there would

surely have been a more effective way to lure the husband there than by holding a private

conversation that they knew he would attempt to record in a place that would make such

a recording unnecessarily difficult. The new version of the “He’d kill us line” (a

completely separate recording is used that shifts the vocal emphasis from “kill” to “us”)

only serves further to deny narrative closure; it remains unclear to the viewer what was

real and what Harry imagined, the conflicting visuals failing to provide the answers

which the audio lacks.

Coppola and Murch frequently withhold audio and visuals that are expected given

the narrative scenario. Chion calls these “negative sounds and images,” whose “absent

presences” are often more important than the visible or audible elements which are

presented (192). The Conversation exhibits an awareness of the viewer’s dependence on

audio cues in aiding comprehension by refusing such audio-visual clarity. The opening

scene rejects the concept of an audio “superfield,” which Chion uses to describe “the

space created…by ambient natural sounds, city noises, music, and all sorts of rustlings

that surround the visual space and that can issue from loudspeakers outside the physical

boundaries of the screen” (150). The advances in technology that made the conveyance

of these ambient spaces in audio form possible “logically had the effect of undermining

the narrative importance of the [visual] long shot,” because in an instant, or in the

background, the audio alone could express the environmental context (Chion 150). The

Conversation’s opening shot provides an expansive view of San Francisco’s Union

Square, filled with people and activity, but the audio presents a stunted, mysterious

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perspective that hears only electronic tracking noises, a perspective whose source is not

revealed until several minutes later. The effect is to put immediately into question

whether or not the relationship between audio and visual may be trusted.

Other structural editing techniques in The Conversation similarly emphasize the

artificial—and therefore unreliable—nature of the film’s audio. Sounds start and stop at

convenient times, overlap and are juxtaposed in unrealistic but thematically relevant

ways, and are reimagined in new contexts and forms, as with the varied distorted versions

of “he’d kill us” which appear over the course of the film. The phone in Harry’s

apartment is a frequent source of reflection on his profession and privacy. At the

beginning of the film, the musical score cuts out unconventionally early (midway through

Harry’s process of fumbling with his keys). This gives ample acoustic space to the

phone, which rings with a call from Harry’s landlord just as Harry opens the door and

sees that the landlord, unbeknownst to Harry, had entered the apartment earlier in the day

and left him a birthday gift. Likewise, at the film’s close, the jazz record to which Harry

is listening finishes in perfect synchronization with him answering a phone call from his

employer’s assistant (Harrison Ford), who warns him that his apartment has been bugged.

The characters in the film, like the viewer, are part of a cinematic world in which

every sound event has added, albeit ambiguous, meaning, regardless of its literal

significance. Harry uses the sound of a toilet flushing to disguise the noise he makes

setting up surveillance devices in the hotel, but the flushing sound is replaced by a

distorted rendition of the recorded conversation when the clogged toilet in the adjacent

room overflows with blood and (supposedly) confirms his fears. At the moment when

audio and visual would be expected to unite in revealing the truth, the audio instead

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falters, planting doubts about the reality of the scene. These contrived audio edits expose

the deliberate manipulation of viewer comprehension and focus, giving an illusion of

reality while offering conflicting, vague, or outright false meanings.

EXPOSITION

Closely related to structure is exposition, which entails using audio to expand

viewer understanding of physical space or to show the unique consequences which sound

can have within the context and world of the film. Chion uses the term “acousmatic” to

denote sounds that, like the acousmêtre, originate from sources offscreen: “Acousmatic

sound draws our attention to sound traits normally hidden from us by the simultaneous

sight of the causes—hidden because this sight reinforces the perception of certain

elements of the sound and obscures others. The acousmatic truly allows sound to reveal

itself in all its dimensions” (32). A simple example is when Harry visits his romantic

interest, Amy Fredericks (Teri Garr) and tries to sneak into her apartment without being

heard (by her and, perhaps, by the rest of the people in her building). The camera seems

mercifully to allow him this opportunity, but the audio betrays him as we hear the door

unlock and the greetings between Harry and Amy anyway.

One of the most common forms of acousmatic sound in film is “extension,” or

“the degree of openness and breadth of the concrete space suggested by sounds, beyond

the borders of the visual field, and also within the visual field around the characters”

(Chion 87). A veritable class in extension is given during the first scene in Harry’s

apartment as he walks into his bedroom, bathroom, and living room, carrying the phone

with him, continually disappearing and reappearing from view. The camera belatedly

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reveals the scope of the space in which he moves after the sound has already

communicated this information rather effectively.

Such innocent use of extension belies the more sinister implementation that will

follow. When Harry arrives at the hotel to set up his bugging equipment before the

climactic scene, the camera not so subtly lingers on the “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging

from the room he plans on bugging. The message for the viewer is clear: Harry’s audio

equipment will give access to a scene that the camera cannot witness. Harry believes this

as well and prepares to hear the consequences of his work. As things begin to escalate

next door, Harry loses his nerve and abandons his equipment, paralyzed and staring at a

painting in his room. It makes no difference at this point, as the arguments and shouts are

fully audible through the thin hotel walls. Harry steps out on the balcony and sees a

smeared red hand shape slide down the semi-transparent glass separating the balconies.

The visual offers no clue as to who may be bleeding, but the piercing scream of the wife

tells Harry everything he thinks he needs to know. He runs into the hotel room, shuts the

curtains, and curls up in bed with the television on full volume, hoping to drown out the

sounds that confirm his guilt.

In this scene, Coppola and Murch unveil the viewer’s dependence on a film’s

audio. The entire film builds to an undeniable visual of the murder, the bloody hand on

the balcony, and yet sound is (ostensibly) required to fill in the gaps and name the

murderer. However, the use of sound up until this point—the accusation implied in

Harry’s analysis of the recorded tapes—has left the viewer no choice in their

interpretation, and they are not aware that there was even a choice that might have been

made. The audio of the film makes sure that the identification of the murderer is

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uncomplicated, and that the act itself is a cathartic justification for Harry’s obsessive

worrying over the tapes. When the actual inflection of the “he’d kill us” line is revealed

(though, again, I do not think given the complexity of the preceding narrative that such a

pat explanation is necessarily reliable), Harry and the viewer hear that they were tricked

all along. Even as Harry sees that the wife is alive in person the following day, his mind

drifts to the tapes and visual memory of the conversation, trying to understand how the

audio had led him so far astray.

CONSCIOUSNESS

The final category of audio I will examine is consciousness, those sounds that

demonstrate an aspect of Harry’s evolving mental and physical condition and often fill

his moments of introspection and conflicted decision-making. It could be argued that all

of the sounds in The Conversation serve this purpose to some extent, but there are certain

points during the film at which the sound forces a distinct and crucial focus on Harry’s

personality and the burdensome effect of his increasing curiosity about his latest bugging

assignment. Many of those instances also provide a sort of meta-commentary on Harry’s

role as an audio technician, reflecting on the purpose of his work within the narrative and

his creators’ work on the film itself.

From the very beginning, Harry insists that the content of the audio he records has

no significance to him whatsoever: “I don’t care what they’re talking about. All I want is

a nice, fat recording.” In his own spoken dialogue, he promotes the very unreliability of

sound upon which his eventual failure rests. When he says, “I don’t know anything about

curiosity or human nature,” he may as well be speaking of his own obliviousness to the

power of sound to overwhelm his mind and occupy his every thought. When Harry

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listens in on a phone conversation during a party in his warehouse laboratory, one of his

professional acquaintances comments, “What’s the matter, Harry, can’t you take a

vacation?” Offered intimate insight into his perspective on the events of the film,

forever framed by the recorded conversation, the viewer knows he cannot.

Even Harry’s abstract dream is nothing but a visual rendering of his aural

misinterpretation of “he’d kill us if he got the chance.” In a 2000 interview, Murch

explained his merging of audio extension (see above) with the dream-world

representation of Harry’s mental state:

“I always like to think, not only about the sound of the space a character is in, but also about what's outside—to break the wall and invoke some kind of presence of the exterior. Of course, it has to be a reasonably loud or percussive sound, something with a tonality to it, in order to penetrate through walls. Otherwise, you hear a generalized wash of city noise, which sounds like pink noise. It doesn't have much character. So it was a matter of looking for sounds with character that could get through the window and which were also true to the environment that Harry's in. That's really the extent of it. If the environment in which Harry works has trains in it, then he and, by extension, we are going to associate that sound with that environment. Because they are in the atmosphere, trains are going to worm themselves into Harry's dreams.” (Jarrett)

The audio space in the dream (or, Harry’s mind) is comprised entirely of the sounds of

his physical world and interactions. The ambient sounds of his apartment quite literally

overlap with his dream, and even in sleep Harry cannot escape the distorted electronic

sounds of his equipment and the recorded conversation.

Harry’s only semblance of peace comes while at home playing the saxophone, the

music covering up his aural worries and replacing his need for interpersonal interaction, a

recorded audience applauding his improvisation. Harry’s relationship to audio

environments makes up his very existence; they define not just his professional work, but

also his daily interactions, his worldviews, and how others perceive him. Amy comments

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that he has “a certain way of opening the door” which gives him away. Despite his

repeated claims to the contrary, Harry confesses, “People were hurt” because of his work

and he realizes that no amount of denial will atone for those sins. In a particularly

poignant bit of symbolism, Harry drunkenly hits his head on a dangling “Turn Lights

Out” sign just minutes after Meredith hit her head on a hanging piece of audio equipment.

The visual world, Harry thinks, cannot offer the answers and clarity of the things that he

can hear (and audibly manipulate with his equipment), and his unknowing dependence on

this method of reality analysis brings about his mental collapse.

Chion uses “null extension” to refer to “when the sonic universe has shrunk to the

sounds heard by one single character, possibly including any inner voices he or she

hears” (87). This tactic is essential to revealing Harry’s personality and perspective in

The Conversation. The film’s score is an external force, filling the aural environment

around Harry but disconnected from his personal thoughts and reflections. When torn

over whether or not to leave Amy’s apartment after she makes him uncomfortable with

too many questions about his personal life, the piano-led score pauses to allow him space

to decide. Meredith mirrors his opinion on these superfluous noises when she opines,

“Maybe we can be friends. I mean, aside from all this junk,” causing the jazz underscore

to cut out for a lengthy and awkward silent pause. The piano then reenters before Harry

vocalizes an answer to Meredith, restoring the aural wall he has put up to guard against

excessively intimate relationships.

Harry first realizes that sound has betrayed him when his apartment phone rings

with a call from his employer’s assistant. Multiple times he has claimed not to have a

phone number, in an effort to protect the privacy of his home space. When the phone

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rings, the white noise of running water in the bathroom sink fights to drown it out. Harry

ignores the ringing, unwilling to acknowledge its significance, but the sound wins out in

the end and he submits to its power, and, through it, the power of his employer.

Grating electronic sounds (most often those of the audio equipment), are

embedded in Harry’s mind, growing in prominence and intensity when the moral

implications of a situation become too burdensome. The increasing volume of

construction work outside his employer’s office expresses his underlying doubts about

handing over the tapes to the assistant, rather than the employer himself. As he leaves

with the tapes and rides the elevator with the wife he recorded, the tape sounds

overwhelm the musical score, their agitation perfectly mirroring Harry’s own discomfort.

White noise and sonic deficiencies frustrate Harry’s peace of mind as much as they do his

attempts to obtain a clear recording.

HEARING/SEEING

At the very end of The Conversation, Coppola and Murch expose the true nature

of their manipulation beyond simply revealing the properly inflected clip of “he’d kill us

if he got the chance.” First, the percussive music on the tapes overlaps Harry’s

saxophone solo, signaling the inevitable merging of two diegetic sound sources that

Harry has worked so hard to keep separate. His last remaining tool of resistance against

the infiltration of his mind by the object of his profession is destroyed. However, not

content with the mere deconstruction of those boundaries internal to the film, Coppola

and Murch force Harry to improvise along to the film’s musical score in a true final act of

submission to the filmmakers’ aural control. His desperate attempts to locate the bugging

equipment planted in his apartment come up empty; viewers are left to wonder whether it

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is they, rather than the employer’s assistant, who are intruding on the sonic privacy of

Harry’s life.

In a sense, though, Harry stands in for the film viewer and for the utter

dependency on sound in film that the role creates. During a first viewing of The

Conversation, the story seems like that of a traditional thriller. A plot twist within the

world of the film is perhaps to be expected, but no suspicions are raised about viewer

manipulation external to the plot. Watching the film consecutive times exposes the

intricate system of occlusion and falsehood that sets both Harry and the viewer up for

failure. Murch identifies this as a crowning potential achievement of film: audio

recording “encourages play and experimentation…its preeminent virtue” (Chion xv).

Unlike his contemporaries who worked and continue to work to make invisible their

technical constructs, for the purpose of aiding viewer comprehension, Murch disguises

his in order to exploit their power, exposing that exploitation at the end in such a way that

the viewer is left no firm understanding about what was “real” and what was constructed,

what actually “took place” in the narrative, and what was the product of Harry’s or her

own imagination.

Neil Postman argues that writing brought “about a perceptual revolution: a shift

from the ear to the eyes as an organ of language processing” (12). Film, in turn, has

perpetuated this new mode of processing, prompting an ongoing debate over “which is

more important, sound or image,” a debate which ultimately fails to acknowledge the

relationship between the two so firmly established in modern cinema and the alternatives

which might be possible (Chion xxvi). In most films, audio is a crutch for the visual, a

tool for facilitating rapid and confusing edits, for infusing imagery with added meaning,

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and for guiding narrative progression and memory. The shock is remarkable when a film

like The Conversation kicks that crutch out, leaving the viewer and the characters without

their most fundamental tool of comprehension.

When we view an image in the real world, our eyes create a sense of depth by

fusing two images. This depth “is of course…not a hallucination,” but it is nonetheless a

product of the mind “made to seem as if it is coming from out there rather than in here”

(Chion xxi). Murch claims that the same process occurs with visuals and audio in film:

“The mental effort of fusing image and sound in a film produces a ‘dimensionality’ that

the mind projects back onto the image as it had come from the image in the first place…

Despite all appearances, we do not see and hear a film, we hear/see it” (Chion xxi). And,

unlike the stable pair of images that make up human vision, the audio and visual elements

in a film are forever shifting in relation to one another, forcing the viewer to reinterpret

constantly the events onscreen. The Conversation complicates this process even further

by throwing into doubt any understanding of the relationship between its audio, visuals

and narrative, thereby making impossible the establishment of expectations in the audio-

visual relationship between filmmaker and viewer.

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Sources

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Print.

Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. The Conversation. Paramount Pictures, 1974. Film.

Cowie, Peter. Coppola: A Biography. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1994. Print.

Goodwin, Michael and Naomi Wise. On the Edge: The Life and Times of Francis Coppola. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1989. Print.

Jarrett, Michael. “Sound Doctrine: An Interview with Walter Murch.” Michael Jarrett. Penn State York, 2000. Web. 29 Apr. 2013.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Print.

Schumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001. Print.

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i know you - hearing:seeing the conversation

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