The dialogue

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Movie
German title The dialogue
Original title The conversation
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1974
length 109 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Francis Ford Coppola
script Francis Ford Coppola
production Francis Ford Coppola
music David Shire
camera Bill Butler
cut Walter Murch ,
Richard Chew
occupation
synchronization

The dialogue (Original title: The Conversation ) is an American film by Francis Ford Coppola from 1974 , which combines elements of thriller and psychodrama . With the story of the eavesdropping specialist Harry Caul, who got caught up in a murder through his spying activities, producer, writer and director Coppola created a film whose leitmotifs are the main character's paranoia and feelings of guilt. The film makes particular use of the artistic freedom that emerged in the American film industry in the late 1960s under the catchphrase " New Hollywood ".

action

The opening sequence offers a bird's eye view of Union Square in San Francisco . The camera goes down and shows a pantomime . Among the passers-by who mime imitates is a man who is visibly uncomfortable with the imitation and the attention it attracts. The man is the surveillance expert, listening specialist and hobby saxophonist Harry Caul, who, with his team, is stationed on the square and in the surrounding skyscrapers, monitors the young couple Ann and Mark and records their conversation on tapes .

After the observation , Harry returns to his highly secured apartment, where he is angry that his landlady has broken into his privacy. In his business premises on an old factory floor, Harry cuts the tapes of the observation into a single version in the presence of his colleague Stan. He abruptly reprimands Stan when he wants to know more about the background to the assignment. The golden rule of their trade is not to interfere in client affairs, said Harry. When calling from a phone booth, he learns that his client, the "director", cannot be reached.

Harry visits his lover Amy at her apartment, but quickly leaves when she begins to ask him personal questions. The next day Harry visits the director's company to personally hand over the tapes, but is received by his assistant Martin Stett. When Harry refuses to hand over the recordings to Stett because the director is allegedly neither in the house nor in the country, the latter gives him to understand that the tapes are dangerous and warns him against personal interference. As Harry leaves the company, he meets both Mark and Ann, who is riding with him in the elevator. Returning to his workshop, Harry listens to the tapes over and over again in order to discover their secret (which now violates the golden rule of non-interference himself). He finally comes across a passage overlaid with background noise, from which, after using a noise filter, he uses the sentence “He'd kill us if he got the chance.” ("He would kill us if he could.") Believes to hear out. Harry, now concerned that his work might harm the young people, goes to a church and confesses his concerns.

The next day Harry takes part in a trade fair for security and eavesdropping technology. He discovers that Martin Stett is also at the event and feels that he is being followed. He also learns that his co-worker Stan has since defected to his competitor Bernie Moran after an argument with him. In the evening Harry celebrates a spontaneous party in his business premises with Stan, Moran and a few other guests. Moran reveals that Harry contributed to the deaths of three people through his previous employment. Showgirl Meredith stays with Harry after the party and has sex with him. That night Harry dreams of Ann's murder. The next day Meredith disappeared with the tapes. In his apartment, Harry receives a call from Martin Stett on his secret number and learns that the director is now in possession of the tapes. Harry is asked to collect his reward and goes back to the director's office, where he and his assistant Stett listen to the tapes. Harry, whose emotional involvement in the assignment has meanwhile become obvious, asks information about the fate that will threaten the observed, but receives no answer. He leaves the building with a mixture of anger, despair and powerlessness.

Harry rents into the Jack Tarr Hotel because he knows from the tapes that this is the meeting point of the couple under surveillance. In the adjoining hotel room, he installs a microphone in the wall and overhears a heated verbal argument between the director and Ann. When Harry steps out onto the balcony, the murder scene from his nightmare takes place right in front of his eyes. Harry can't look and, in a panic, rushes back to his room, where he crawls under the covers. Only hours later does he gain access to the next room, which has since been abandoned and in which nothing seems to indicate a crime. When Harry flushes the toilet, however, blood gushes out of the clogged drain. Harry wants to confront the director of his company, but instead of him it is Ann he discovers alive in a car; He learns from a newspaper report that the director was killed in a car accident. Harry has to realize that he was completely wrong in his perception. Not Ann, but the director was murdered, the alleged victims were in truth the perpetrators and covered up the murder in the hotel as a traffic accident. As Harry is also clear the distorted passage had on the tape that had lured him to the wrong path, correctly not "He would we kill , if he could." Loud, but "He would we kill her if he could. ”The tiny difference in emphasis, but enormous difference in meaning, which he had previously missed, had triggered the serious misinterpretation. (Note: the difference in emphasis cannot be heard in the German dubbed version.)

After returning to his apartment, Harry receives another call from Martin Stett, who warns him of further interference and tells him that he is being bugged. As proof, Stett played him a tape recording of his saxophone playing. In search of the bug, Harry dismantles his entire rented apartment, even though he does not stop at a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary . The last shot shows Harry playing the saxophone in his destroyed apartment. He didn't find the hidden microphone.

History of origin

Script and preproduction

A first version of the script by Coppola was written in the mid-1960s. He was stimulated by a conversation with Irvin Kershner , in which the aim was to film the ambiguity of information based solely on sound recordings. The dialogue was one of the ten scripts that formed the basis of Coppola's production company American Zoetrope . Several new versions were created, into which Coppola incorporated inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow Up and the book Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse . Coppola names Tennessee Williams as his role model for the character portrayal in the dialogues .

The project could only be realized after the sponsor's great financial and artistic success . After his commissioned work for Paramount , which was marked by differences between the film company and the director, Coppola wanted to direct a more personal and smaller film based on his own original script.

The dialogue was the first film by the Directors Company , a film company that the directors William Friedkin , Peter Bogdanovich and Coppola had jointly founded in order to be able to carry out their projects financially and artistically independently of the large film companies. Both of Coppola's colleagues were not enthusiastic about the script, but had no right of veto over the realization.

Friedkin later commented: “The Conversation was a confused plagiarism of Antonioni's blow-up, in which Francis replaced the photographer with a wiretapping specialist.” Bogdanovich said: “Francis said it was going to be some kind of Hitchcock film, but it had the result not the slightest resemblance to a Hitchcock film. "

Marlon Brando was originally intended for the title role , but he showed no interest in the film. Finally, Gene Hackman, who had recently become a star with his role in French Connection , slipped into the role of Harry Caul. With glasses, mustache, dwindling hairline and make-up that made him a little older, he turned into the lonely and isolated protagonist. Robert Duvall, who had recently starred in Coppola's The Godfather , appears in a cameo as the mysterious director and remained anonymous in the film credits .

Production and post-production

Union Square , San Francisco, location of the film

Filming began on November 26, 1972 in Union Square, San Francisco. Four teams with six cameras filmed the couple's dialogue from different perspectives under technically difficult conditions, as Coppola wanted the impression of an observation , during which the cameras had to "capture" their object again and again, realistically and the passers-by had no idea that a film was shot around them.

The shooting was delayed by ten days when the cameraman Haskell Wexler , who found himself unable to prepare and illuminate the sets satisfactorily, had to be exchanged for Bill Butler. Coppola used this time to watch the film The Great Error by Bernardo Bertolucci again and again , which, like The Dialogue, portrayed the life of a person isolated from the outside world. The planned 40 days of shooting became 56 days, the budget rose from the planned 1.6 million dollars to 1.9 million dollars.

The relationship between director and lead actor became increasingly difficult as the filming progressed, as Hackman often appeared strangely absent. Hackman struggled to portray a character who was constantly suppressing emotions. Hackman said, “It's a depressing and difficult role because it's so withdrawn. The moment you have fun with it, you know that you have missed the representation. "

In March 1973 filming was completed and Coppola performed a rough cut version that was rejected by his colleagues from the Directors Company . Walter Murch set about the extensive post-production of the film in terms of editing and sound editing, which lasted almost a year. The end was even cut several times and parts of a conversation between Caul and Ann planned as a final point were processed in the dream sequence. Meanwhile, Coppola was already busy with the preparations and the shooting of The Godfather - Part II .

The film opened in cinemas on April 7, 1974, on Coppola's birthday. The premiere took place at the Coronet Theater in New York City . The film was released in the Federal Republic on September 12, 1974. The film opened in GDR cinemas on March 26, 1976.

synchronization

The German dubbed version was created on the occasion of the German cinema premiere at Berliner Synchron . The dialogue book was written by Fritz A. Koeniger , while Dietmar Behnke took care of the dubbing .

role actor German Dubbing voice
Harry Caul Gene Hackman Horst Niendorf
Stan, Harry's co-worker John Cazale Wolfgang Draeger
William 'Bernie' Moran, Harry's competitor Allen Garfield Heinz Theo branding
Ann, bugged person Cindy Williams Barbara Hampel
Mark, bugged person Frederic Forrest Ulrich Gressieker
Paul, Harry's second collaborator Michael Higgins Eric Vaessen
Meredith, Bernie's colleague Elizabeth MacRae Brigitte Grothum
Amy, Harry's lover Teri Garr Dagmar Biener
Martin Stett, assistant to the director Harrison Ford Dieter B. Gerlach
The director Robert Duvall Rolf Schult
Receptionist Mark Wheeler Hans-Jürgen Dittberner

Reception and aftermath

source rating
Rotten tomatoes
critic
audience
Metacritic
critic
audience
IMDb

Most of the criticism reacted positively to the film. Variety confirmed that it was "so far [...] Coppola's most complete, safest and most award-winning film, and the years it took to get it on screen were well worth the persistence."

The jury of Evangelical Film Work in Germany named Der Dialog the “Film of the Month” and wrote about the film: “The story told by Coppola of a listening specialist who fails because of the problems of his profession is also losing due to certain elements of the gossip , of which the film is interspersed, nothing in terms of urgency. "

The lexicon of international films praised the work as “a quiet, calm and brilliantly staged study that meticulously describes the penetration of technology into people's privacy. A nightmare of the destruction of the human individual area ”.

Despite good reviews, the dialogue was not a great success with the public. The audience disliked the obscure story and lack of logic. For those who saw the film as a superficial thriller, the storylines were not resolved satisfactorily: How far was the cheating planned by those under observation? What was Ann's relationship with the director? What role did Martin Stett play in the murder plot? Who installed the bug in Caul's apartment? In addition, shortly after the Watergate affair , the audience was tired of surveillance and wiretapping. Coppola was accused of having attached himself to the scandal thematically. He said: "I firmly believe that the film would have been better received had it not been for Watergate."

The New York Times said that Der Dialog had a difficult time compared to Coppola's blockbusters with big audiences: "This is perhaps Coppola's best film, but in terms of audience approval it can never slip out of the shadow of its overpowering brothers Godfather and Apocalypse Now ."

Roger Ebert looked back in 2001 in the Chicago Sun-Times on the strengths of the film compared to current thrillers: “The dialogue comes from a different time [...] than today's thrillers, which are often so simple-minded. This film is a sadly observational character study about a man who has removed himself from life, thinks he can numbly electronically monitor it, and finds that all of his ramparts are useless. The film […] is intentionally planned from a voyeuristic point of view; we all look, but we don't see everything. Here is a man who seeks the truth, but it always remains hidden. "

Coppola considers Der Dialog to be his best film: “It is a personal film based on a script that he wrote himself. It stands for where I wanted to steer my career. "

The aftermath of this film, which on the one hand can be seen as "one of the key films of the 1970s" ( TV Guide ), on the other hand is still justified in today's times due to its subject of fear of surveillance and restriction of personal freedom, continues to this day .

Gene Hackman played 25 years after The Dialogue in the thriller Enemy of the State No. 1 with the role of Brill, a surveillance specialist who is himself a victim of surveillance, a character who has clear similarities to Harry Caul. As a reference to The Dialogue, there is even an old photo of Hackman as Harry Caul in Brill's NSA file.

Film analysis

Fear of persecution as a social background

After the assassinations of John F. Kennedy , Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the revelations of the Watergate affair, a mood of social insecurity began to develop in the USA in the early 1970s. Hollywood reflected in films such as Witness to a Conspiracy and The Three Days of the Condor that conspiracy theories and the fear of private persecution were issues that preoccupied people. The dialogue can be seen as a contribution to this development. Coppola said in the New York Times : “The film should be an important statement on the nightmarish development of our society. The system uses all highly developed electronic possibilities to sniff out our private lives. ” The dialogue has been described as“ Orwell's moral piece ”: The spy is spied on, his equipment is used against himself and he ultimately breaks.

Subjective narration

Harry Caul is portrayed as a clearly paranoid character: his apartment is secured with three locks; he keeps his phone, the number of which nobody is allowed to know, in a drawer. In order to generate a certain sympathy with the rather unsympathetic main character in the viewer, the film strictly maintains Caul's perspective: the viewer knows nothing that Caul does not know at the time of the film. There are no explanatory secondary scenes that could give the viewer a knowledge advantage. Coppola rarely allows him a long shot . Most of the time only parts of reality are visible as they correspond to Caul's point of view. Coppola underlines this selective perception of the environment with another stylistic device, namely repetition. The shadowed dialogue is played over and over, each time revealing new aspects for Harry, but tragically the full truth only when it is too late.

The main character as an isolated character

Caul is not a thriller hero like Dirty Harry , who drives the plot forward on his own initiative, but a private person like Michael Corleone in Godfather or Willard in Apocalypse Now . He looks like through a one-way mirror into the outside world (there is a corresponding scene in the surveillance bus that is equipped with such mirrors), but does not reveal himself to it, but is actually at war with it. Caul's dilemma is that on the one hand he wants to protect his own privacy pathologically and for this reason suppresses his own personality beyond recognition, but on the other hand has to constantly break into that of other people through his job. The fact that Caul's moral concepts stem from Catholicism makes this conflict even more tragic.

In the first scene in Caul's apartment we see a wrecking ball in front of the window busy destroying the apartment block opposite: a first indication that Caul's privacy is under attack. Towards the end of the film, the apartment block is completely in ruins; Harry lost the fight to keep his intimacy.

Analogous to Caul's personality, the sets chosen by Coppola are cool, impersonal and unfamiliar to the viewer.

In addition, the bizarre plot adds to Caul's uncertainty: for example, his lover Amy can suddenly no longer be reached by phone, a fact for which neither Caul nor the viewer is given an explanation.

Coppola feared that the isolation and withdrawn character of his "hero" would make the audience unable to develop empathy and lose interest in the film. In the dream sequence with Ann, the only scene in which Caul reveals anything about his past, Coppola lets Caul say that he suffered from polio in his childhood . Coppola, who had survived this illness himself as a child, hoped in this way to provide the audience with a clue to empathize with Caul.

Influences and interpretations

Coppola relates thematically to Blow Up. If at Antonioni it is a photographer who witnesses a possible murder through his work, Coppola transfers this idea of ​​action to the eavesdropping specialist Caul, to whom this happens not on the basis of a photo but a sound recording. Through the figure of the pantomime, Coppola also creates a direct reference to Antonioni's film.

The murder scene in the hotel is clearly reminiscent of Psycho : When Caul is looking for evidence of the crime, he checks the shower for evidence of battle. The pulling back of the shower curtain and the shot showing the shower drainage put the viewer on the wrong track, which dissolves when in Coppola's film it is the toilet bowl that brings the bloody remains of the crime to light. The use of the symbolism of blood and water in this scene is reminiscent of the godfather, where Coppola had cut the scene of a baptism versus that of a blood bath. However, Walter Murch claims in the DVD-Audio commentary that he suggested using the toilet because of his own experience: In his youth he consumed pornographic magazines and flushed into the toilet for fear of being discovered by his parents. However, the notebooks would have clogged the drain and would have been discovered by the parents when they were flushed up again.

Another influence, less thematic than in the character portrayal of the main character, is Hesse's Steppenwolf . Like Hesse's character Harry Haller , Harry Caul also suffers from the deep inner conflict of being an outsider to his environment on the one hand, but not being able to break away from it due to his feelings of guilt and his conscience and ultimately failing on it. Harry Caul was called Harry Caller in the first version of the screenplay based on Hesse , which was later shortened to Harry Call . When typing the dictated script, however, the clerk Coppolas wrote down the phonetically identical Harry Caul . Coppola kept the name, because Caul is the English name for a lucky hood , a membrane that sometimes covers newborns. In fact, in the film, Caul is often covered in translucent objects. You can see him behind plastic curtains or Plexiglas panes, and for a large part of the film Caul wears a transparent raincoat that he does not even take off when he gets into bed with his lover. The American film scholar James W. Palmer interprets the film as the biography of an unborn man, a person who suffers from his own birth process to a moral existence. This is also indicated by Harry's often childlike behavior, for example crawling into bed in order not to notice anything about the murder next door.

Film technical means

Implementation of paranoia through camera work

The film uses the feeling of paranoia and surveillance especially in its camera work. In the opening sequence, as was popular in many 1970s films, we see the use of zoom . In a long shot that is time-programmed to change the focal length , the camera view moves down from an overview position, attaches itself to the back of the main character's head and follows their path across the square. A first indication that the central theme of the film is the surveillance situation is given.

Many settings are static like those of a surveillance camera . Acting persons go out of the picture and you can hear their voices off- screen . When he leaves the camera's viewing angle, a camera follows Caul in his apartment with a delay. The last shot shows Caul's apartment from the ceiling and the camera pans back and forth mechanically like the surveillance camera in a supermarket or public building.

Music and sound

In a film that dealt with wiretapping, of course, sound was of great importance. The sound was produced on eight-track machines and mixed for the final mono mix by Walter Murch, who was responsible for editing control, sound editing and re-recording according to the film credits . Characteristic of Murch's work are the disappearing and recurring voices of the recorded conversation and the underlay of disturbing electronic interference.

At the filmmaker's request, the composer of the soundtrack, Coppola's brother-in-law David Shire, did without a large orchestration and wrote a sparse film score based on the sounds of a single piano , only occasionally supplemented by a low frequency tone. Sometimes with an almost childlike touch, sometimes with bluesy overtones, the music supported Hackman's restrained game in the character drawing. The soundtrack was completed before filming and was played to the actors before filming to help them get the right feel for the scene.

Standards by Duke Ellington , Johnny Green , Edward Heyman and others also created the melancholy mood.

DVDs and Blu-ray

In 2000, Der Dialog appeared in North America on DVD with image transmission in anamorphic widescreen . The sound was remixed in Dolby Digital 5.1 with the help of Walter Murch . In addition to the eight-minute featurette Close-up on the Conversation with original recordings from the shoot and the original cinema trailer , the DVD contains audio commentary by Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch.

On November 3, 2011, “Der Dialog” was released in German-speaking countries on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Awards

In 1974 Der Dialog won the Grand Prix at the 27th Cannes Film Festival .

At the 1975 Academy Awards for 1974, the film was nominated for three Academy Awards: Francis Ford Coppola had nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay ; Walter Murch and Art Rochester were nominated for Best Sound . Coppola was thus in competition with himself for the Oscars, because The Godfather II was also nominated for the best film and ultimately won. Coppola went out of the award ceremony with three Oscars for the second part of the godfather , but the dialogue remained without an Oscar award.

At the BAFTA Awards 1975 Walter Murch and Richard Chew were honored for the best film editing. Art Rochester, Nathan Boxer , Michael Evje and Walter Murch received the award for the best sound .

The National Board of Review recorded the dialogue in the "Best Actor" (Gene Hackman), "Best Director" and "Best Foreign Film" from.

The film was nominated for Best Director , Best Picture , Best Actor and Best Screenplay at the Golden Globes , but received no awards.

The dialogue was included in the National Film Registry in 1995.

literature

Scripts

  • Francis Ford Coppola: The conversation: original screenplay . San Francisco: The Director's Co., 1972. (The original script for the film)
  • Ralph S. Singleton, Francis Ford Coppola: Film scheduling, film budgeting: workbook . Santa Monica, Calif .: Lone Eagle, 1989, ISBN 0-943728-07-X (Budgeting and planning workbook; contains the script)

Secondary literature

  • Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Francis Ford Coppola . Hanser Verlag (Film 33 series) Munich Vienna 1985, ISBN 3-446-14193-6 .
  • Ronald Bergan: Close-up: Francis Ford Coppola . Publisher Rowohlt Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-499-60652-6 .
  • Gerard Naziri: Paranoia in American Cinema - The 70s and the Consequences . Gardez! Verlag Sankt Augustin 2003, ISBN 3-89796-087-7 .
  • Gene D. Phillips: Godfather: the intimate Francis Ford Coppola . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004, ISBN 0-8131-2304-6 .
  • David Wilson: Sight and sound: a fiftieth anniversary selection . London: Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-11943-3 .

Web links

Film databases

German-language web links

English-language web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Bergan, pp. 61–65.
  2. ↑ Peter Biskind: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex Drugs and Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Heyne Taschenbuch 2004, ISBN 3-453-87785-3 , p. 149.
  3. ↑ a b c d DVD-Audio commentary by Francis Ford Coppola.
  4. ↑ Biskind, p. 360.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Jansen / Schütte pp. 105–114.
  6. ↑ Gerald Peary: The Conversation, American Movie Classics Magazine, Fall 2000 .
  7. ↑ German synchronous index | Movies | The dialogue. Retrieved April 27, 2020 .
  8. ↑ a b [1] at Rotten Tomatoes , accessed on March 4, 2015
  9. ↑ a b [2] at Metacritic , accessed on March 4, 2015
  10. ↑ The dialog in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  11. ^ Bergan pp. 157–159.
  12. ↑ Information sheet on the pages of the community work of Evangelical Publizistik e. V. ( Memento of September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 29 kB)
  13. ↑ The dialogue. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  14. ^ Review of February 4, 2001 on the pages of Roger Ebert .
  15. ^ Gene D. Phillips: Godfather: the intimate Francis Ford Coppola . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004, p. 82.
  16. ^ Trivia on Public Enemy No. 1 in the IMDb .
  17. ↑ a b c d e Naziri, pp. 73–119.
  18. ↑ Dennis Turner: The Subject of The Conversation , Cinema Journal 24.4, 1985, pp. 4-22.
  19. ↑ a b c DVD-Audio commentary by Walter Murch.
  20. ↑ James W. Palmer: The Conversation: Coppola's Biography of an Unborn Man , Film Heritage, 12.1, Fall 1976, pp. 26-32.
  21. ↑ James Monaco: Understanding Film , Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag 2000, p. 126.
  22. ↑ Bergan p. 159.
  23. ↑ Studiocanal www.studiocanal.de/blu-ray/der_dialog-collectors_edition-blu-ray Studiocanal .
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on November 4, 2006 in this version .