Sound and Vision

opening of The Conversation (1974)

Today in class we looked at the opening credit sequence of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974). It's a masterful long, slow, single shot descending from above to zoom in on Union Square Park in San Francisco. We instantly feel disoriented — where are we positioned? who are we supposed to look at? The audio track, which indiscriminately picks up all the ambient noise in the plaza — from street musicians to the garbled conversation of the title, underscores this confusion and cacophony. The needle-like pillar divides the frame in symmetrical halves, one in the light and one in shadow, and there is an immediate sense of moral stakes.  Something is not right, but we don't yet know what.

Gene Hackman in the opening of The Conversation (1974)

Deliberately, the camera begins to follow people as it closes in. We watch a mime working the crowd. Then he hands off the focus to a man in a raincoat (Gene Hackman), whom we follow next. Then, there's the first cut and we see a sniper on a rooftop, surveilling the scene. The layers of voyeurism become complicated. We were the watchers, but now watching is suspicious and threatening. The man in the raincoat seems to be our target, but he seems to be following someone too. In the first few minutes the film has set up a visual idea and left us without a stable perspective. We will later discover that our man in the raincoat is just as disoriented as we are, that he too is not sure of what is going on and struggling to see and hear clearly. This economical opening encapsulates the whole.

NB: check out another good blog post on this opening sequence and an excellent article on writers' use of this "zooming in/out" technique.