Witness a conspiracy
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Witness a conspiracy |
| Original title | The Parallax View |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1974 |
| length | 102 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Alan J. Pakula |
| script |
David Giler , Lorenzo Semple Jr. |
| production | Alan J. Pakula |
| music | Michael Small |
| camera | Gordon Willis |
| cut | John W. Wheeler |
| occupation | |
| |
Witness to a conspiracy (original title: The Parallax View , German alternative title: The Conspiracy ) is an American feature film from 1974. It is based on the novel The Parallax View by Loren Singer . Alan J. Pakula produced and directed this political thriller starring Warren Beatty in the role of a journalist who uncovered a political conspiracy by the mysterious Parallax Corporation . Together with Klute (1971) and Die Unbrechlichen (1976), Witness to a conspiracy forms the so-called " Paranoia Trilogy" in Pakula's work.
action
The US Senator Charles Carroll is murdered on the observation deck of the Space Needle in Seattle on the American National Day . The alleged assassin falls after a scuffle into the depths. Local reporter Joseph Frady, television reporter Lee Carter and Carroll's advisor Austin Tucker were among the witnesses of the attack. A Senate investigative commission comes to the conclusion that the attack was the act of an individual.
Three years later, Joe Frady receives information from Lee Carter that several witnesses to the assassination attempt died under unknown circumstances. A short time later, Carter is also dead. Joe investigates the suspicion that the deaths were part of a conspiracy and searches the town of Salmontail for clues to the missing Austin Tucker. The sheriff, who initially appears to be helpful, tries to murder Frady, but Frady is able to overwhelm him and finds a psychological questionnaire from the Parallax Corporation in the sheriff's house , which apparently recruits aggressive men. Frady manages to find Tucker, who has gone into hiding, but his yacht explodes on a boat trip with him: Tucker and his bodyguard die, Frady escapes unharmed.
Joe allows himself to be recruited by the Parallax Corporation under a false identity and is subjected to a kind of lie detector test in which he is shown an educational film that creates links between fundamental American values and the use of violence. Frady tracks down a Parallax employee and finds out that he has placed a bomb on a plane that is carrying another Senator, Gillingham. Joe manages to save Gillingham and all passengers before the bomb explodes. While Bill Rintels, Frady's editor-in-chief, who is privy to its activities, becomes another Parallax murder victim , Frady receives his first assignment in the service of the company. Instead of doing this, however, he pursues the assassin known to him and ends up in a huge auditorium in which an election campaign appearance by Senator John Hammond is rehearsed. Hammond is ambushed by Parallax during this rehearsal, and suspicion is directed to Joe Frady. Ultimately, a Parallax employee also shoots Frady in the auditorium.
The film ends with the announcement of a senate commission similar to that at the beginning of the film. The commission finds that Senator Hammond's murder was the act of lone perpetrator Joe Frady.
History of origin
Script and preproduction
Lorenzo Semple Jr. wrote the script to witness a conspiracy based on a novel by Loren Singer , with almost nothing left of the novel's content in the script except the basic idea. Gabriel Katzka , the film's executive producer , passed the script on to Pakula and Beatty. Pakula liked the “almost expressionistic quality” of the script and the “focus on the mythical American hero and many other American myths” . David Giler continued to work on the script and, according to Pakula, “brought in more archetypal characters and locations” .
Beatty returned after three years of absence from the film business, in which he worked, among other things, as a supporter of George McGovern in his presidential election, with witness to a conspiracy back on the screen.
Production and post-production
A strike by the Screenwriters Guild of America meant that when shooting began in the spring of 1973, a complete script was not available. Pakula wanted to postpone shooting, but since Beatty's contract contained the clause that he was entitled to his fee regardless of whether the film was made or not, the studio urged Pakula to start shooting with the script at hand. "The film was shot in hair-raising conditions," said Pakula, "To talk about improvisation, we had a script with a beginning, a middle and an end." However, there were only a few fully worked out sequences. So Pakula wrote the texts for the scenes that were to be shot in the afternoon himself. He feared that because of his multiple workloads as producer, director and additionally as screenwriter, he could lose sight of the central theme and the central theme. Therefore, he forced himself to keep the original concept and refrained from incorporating a romantic love story into the plot, which was rather unusual at the time.
The opening scene with the murder on the Space Needle was completely redesigned for the film by Pakula. Originally, this assassination attempt should not be seen, but rather reference should be made to a murder that should have happened in Dallas during a parade with cars. Pakula found this disrespectful because of the similarities with the Kennedy assassination .
The film was shot at locations in Washington State , San Francisco and Malibu , after Pakula had previously unsuccessfully looked for suitable locations in New Mexico .
After filming was completed, post-production took almost a year before the film was released. As usual with his films, Pakula himself was intensively involved in post-production and editing. It took Pakula almost four months just to compile and edit the instructional film sequence, a scene that was also not included in the original script.
Reception and aftermath
Witness to a conspiracy did rather poorly at the box office, which was possibly also due to the insufficient promotion for the film. Beatty was already busy writing and producing his next film, Shampoo , and Paramount boss Bob Evans was more interested in promoting Chinatown than Pakula's film.
The film critics assessed witness to a conspiracy quite negatively. Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that the film was “the kind of suspense melodrama that goes straight from start to finish. The moments of tension do not increase in the course of the film ... Once you have noticed them, they dissolve completely towards the end, so that you could feel as cheated as I did. The film ... at no moment deserves our attention with anything more substantial than a few minor shock effects ... Using a subject like a politically motivated murder for entertainment purposes only is frivolous. "
David Thomson complained in the Independent on Sunday that the film "has no happy ending and lacks a likeable main character."
Stephen Holden , in a comparative work on conspiracy films, claims that witnessing a conspiracy was "probably the most mindless and irresponsible" and that he was "full of flaws" . Holden continued: “The interesting thing is that a large part of the audience is willing to take such an obviously paranoid vision at face value. The film is too cowardly to bring charges directly. By making the conspirators ... so nebulous, Pakula may have hoped to add to the appeal of the film by letting each viewer use their favorite villain as the head behind the attacks. Regardless of whether you are afraid of the American Nazi Party or the American Communist Party , whether of the oil industry, the CIA , Henry Kissinger or Ralph Nader , any of them could be involved in the ominous Parallax Corporation. "
Richard T. Jameson, on the other hand, praised the film in 1976: “While the conspiracy wasn't a huge box office hit, every audience I saw was tied to the big screen. This film is Pakula's most exciting and exciting. "
Ian John confirmed in The Times that the film was "one of the best political thrillers of the 1970s. A calling card of the paranoid anti-government mood of the time, which left its mark on an entire generation. "
Film analysis
The conspiracy film against the background of social development
Incidents such as the assassinations of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy , the Watergate scandal, and the Vietnam War deeply unsettled American society in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Films like The Dialogue and Chinatown expressed a feeling of loss of basic moral values and the fear that not only could anyone influence the democratic order, but even the state and the government itself could do so.
Pakula says that the motivation for the film is “a kind of desperation and fear of social developments. Most films in America are about good and bad. The difference is, however, and this is where the American and European imaginations differ, that in America evil is always known. In the western, for example, the bad guy is always the guy with the gun at the other end of the street during the shooting. Sometimes it takes some time to discover it, but you find it and see it clearly. The villain is recognizable, stands completely free and you can kill him. " Pakula adds that you live “in a world where the heroes don't necessarily win anymore ... Not only that you can't find the bad guys, not only that you can't destroy them, sometimes you can't even find them find out who the bad guys are. We live in a Kafkaesque world in which you simply cannot find evil anymore. It permeates society ... We live in a world of secrets, in a world in which one no longer even recognizes who wants to destroy our society. Witnessing a conspiracy is an almost nightmarish reflection on that fear, a kind of American myth based on things that have happened, on ideas of things that may or may have happened, and on the fears many of us have about these things. "
America in a distorting mirror: the parallactic shift in perspective
The original English title of the film refers to the scientific phenomenon of parallax : an object apparently changes its position when the viewer changes his own position. The first scene of the film shows this clearly: we see an Indian totem pole . The camera pans elegantly to the left and behind the totem pole, this object of ancient American wisdom, the Space Needle, a product of the modern USA, comes to light. The perspective has changed, the perspective has shifted and we now see something that was previously hidden from us. This shift of one's own point of view in order to get a new perspective on facts is the central theme of the film. The America that Frady sees due to his own changing perspective is no longer the old, moral America, but a modern USA, in which violence and the destruction of privacy play a central role. Pakula says witnessing a conspiracy is "looking at America like through a distorting mirror, which allows certain facts to be presented more clearly."
An American poster gallery
Witness a conspiracy is full of US national symbols and icons. Pakula explains: “I wanted to do the film as a kind of poster gallery. As American baroque. That's the old Hitchcock thing: if you're making a film about Switzerland, use cuckoo clocks and chocolate. For America, I took golf carts ... and the Space Needle. "
When Senator Hammond is shot, his driverless golf cart drives into the middle of the rows of tables in the auditorium, which are wearing tablecloths in the American national colors red, white and blue. Pakula wanted "this man to be caught in the middle of the American flag ."
Pakula's interest in "mythical American things" is also evident in the fact that, in witnessing a conspiracy, he uses some of the clichés of American action films in a rather stereotypical manner. There is no lack of a classic bar fight, in which vast amounts of inventory are broken, nor a car chase with corresponding devastation, in which the hero is allowed to make a wide arc across the road with his car presented in slow motion.
Politics as a stage
A Senate investigative commission can be seen twice in the film. Both times the podium seems to float freely in space in absolute blackness. Although the announcement is addressed to an audience, that audience cannot be seen. Pakula thereby reinforces the impression that it is a staged representation as in a stage play. The lie of the staging is exposed by Pakula by the fact that in the first scene at the beginning of the film title the scenery is frozen , while in the last scene at the beginning of the credits all the senators suddenly disappeared from the podium in a “magical” shot.
The hero as an uprooted person
Joe Frady is portrayed in the film as, according to Pakula, the "absolutely uprooted modern man" . We learn next to nothing about his history and private life. He moves homeless across the country and lives in cheap motel rooms. Accordingly, Pakula chose modern and cool surroundings for all locations and sets. Only the editor-in-chief Rintel's office is furnished in a warm, old-fashioned style. It represents old, dying America with its anachronistic values. It is the only place Frady can retreat to and which serves as a replacement for his home.
Witness to a conspiracy seems so cool to the viewer because the hero does not have to suffer an internal conflict, but his actions are determined by the external events and thus correspond to the conventions of classic action films. His lack of relationship makes it difficult for the viewer to establish an emotional bond with him.
The educational film in the film: Preservation of values through violence
Parallax subjects Frady to a psychological experiment in which a film is played to him while an apparatus measures Frady's emotional reaction based on his skin conductance . The Parallax Corporation educational film stands on its own as a film within the film; there are no intercuts to Frady as the viewer, and the viewer can feel just as much as the addressee of the message as Frady. For five minutes, a flood of individual images streams in on the viewer, interrupted by repeating plaques with the inscriptions Love , Mother , Father , Me , Home , Country , God , Enemy and Happiness . The whole sequence contains 350 cuts, which means that the individual images change faster than every second on average.
We see things and objects such as a church, the White House , a steak, whiskey, stacks of coins, a Rolls-Royce , guns and cartridges. Portraits of real people like Hitler , Mao , Castro , Martin Luther King , General McArthur , George Washington , Abraham Lincoln and Jack Ruby , as Lee Harvey Oswald shoots, alternate with cartoon characters such as Thor and iconographic images like that of Uncle Sam . Lynch murders, photos from the Vietnam War and pictures of events of the NSDAP and the Ku Klux Klan are cut against the pictures of happy lovers . We see half-naked men who clearly come from the gay movement, a menacing column of police officers, homeless people and pictures of fathers, mothers and children.
The sequence begins with harmonious music with images of happy family and love life, then the images get into a seemingly chaotic order, while the music intensifies martially. Changes in meaning compared to classic social values take place, for example, seeing the White House in connection with the Enemy tablet . Towards the end, the old order is restored, the basic American values seem intact again and are supplemented by images of weapons. The message becomes clear that the preservation of the basic order can only be made possible through the use of force.
Pakula explains his motivation as follows: “The test should show that one can be destroyed by society. You can be left behind and then surrender to the feeling of powerlessness .... The Parallax Corporation tells you that you can be Superman , that you can break free and put the world back to order through destruction .... It there are also oedipal allusions. You see the picture of a mother, and suddenly that of a boy who looks as if he was just about to open his pants and bare himself in front of his mother ... and then suddenly the father figure ... as she chases the little boy and wants to punish .... Sexual confusion and the interactions between sex and violence. It starts with the happy couple making love and it ends in a shootout. "
The film composer Michael Small only had a few days to write the music for this sequence, but he worked with the full confidence of the director, who was very satisfied with the result: “It started with this wonderfully simple folk melody and then followed Americana - Sounds, very simple and terribly innocent. Ultimately it culminates in a kind of acid rock hysteria. "
Since then, the parallax sequence has been quoted and parodied several times in assembly technique and content, for example in the film Zoolander and in the video clip for Billy Joel's song Pressure .
Cinematic means
Deterministic camera and omissions
The camera work in witnessing a conspiracy is always forward-looking and calculated. There are no wild pans with a documentary character in the action scenes and almost no POV shots that show the action from the hero's point of view. The camera operates from a position that all events are predetermined and unchangeable. In this way Pakula and his cameraman Willis succeed in making clear the relentless consequence of the progress of the plot up to the hero's ultimate failure.
The camera repeatedly withholds image content from the viewer, for example by excluding people. In the morgue during the autopsy on Lee Carter's body, for example, the viewer only notices at the end of the shot that Frady is also there. This is supposed to create an oppressive mood and a feeling of irrevocability. Establishing shots are almost completely absent, the audience is randomly thrown into the scenes to reinforce this feeling.
Willis also repeats this principle of exclusion in the shots that show the Parallax administration building : the borders of the buildings always remain unclear through his image framing , the viewer only sees impenetrable mirror surfaces, the borders of which are outside the image section.
The principle of exclusion and omission is continued in the representation of the plot: Neither the death of Lee Carter nor that of Bill Rintel can be seen. The viewer is only confronted with the result of the murders without any further explanations being given. Pakula says: “Witnessing a conspiracy needed a certain amount of hypnosis to work. If you break off and explain so much that the hypnotic rhythm of the film is interrupted, then you may make it more believable on an intellectual level, but what emotionally captivates the audience may collapse ” .
Shadows and darkness, reflections and distortions
The camera work and lighting by Gordon Willis, who is also called the “Prince of Darkness” by colleagues due to his preference for low-key recordings , is designed so that large parts of the film are set in gloom or total darkness. Sometimes the protagonists can only be made out as silhouettes. Actors step out of dark shadows into bright light and back again, in order to make it impossible to categorize the characters as good or bad simply through the illumination. The conspiratorial and ambiguous character of the film is also made clear by the fact that figures are often reflected in a distorted manner in glass surfaces or in the water or are only vaguely visible behind curtains, frosted glass doors or Plexiglas panes.
Play with the proportions
Pakula often lets his characters act in gigantic environments in this film. When Frady fights with the sheriff, the two can only be made out as tiny figures against the backdrop of a gigantic dam. The auditorium in which the last attack took place is also so empty and spacious that the few people present in it appear lost and small. Pakula uses this stylistic device “in the sense that the characters are manipulated, so small characters are in a big game.” To counter this, one sees in a scene in which Frady meets an ex-FBI man who both ride on a miniature train that is actually intended for children. The game with the proportions is reversed here.
Sound and music
The tone is cleverly used in witnessing a conspiracy to create additional moments of tension. At the beginning of the film we hear diffuse, seemingly archaic drum noises accompanying the image of the totem pole. Only with the next take do we notice that it is the marching music of the national parade. Disturbing background noises such as telephone ringing and howling of sirens, loudspeaker announcements and voices muffled, echoing or whispering through glass are omnipresent. In the dam scene, the tremendous rush of the falling water extinguishes the dialogue between the two opponents. Michael Small's music is dominated by the sound of solemn trumpets, stylistically arranged between the hymn and the funeral march. In suspense scenes, Small relies on dissonant single tones in the interval of the small ninth .
Awards
Gordon Willis won the 1975 National Society of Film Critics Awards for Best Cinematography . He also received the award for his performance in The Godfather - Part II .
Witness a Conspiracy was also nominated for Best Picture at the 1975 Edgar Allan Poe Awards and 1975 Writers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Adaptation from Another Medium. The nominated David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr. both went empty-handed.
literature
- Loren Singer : The Parallax View . Second Chance Press, Sagaponack (NY) and J. Landesman, London 1981, 185 pp., ISBN 0-933256-20-5 or ISBN 0-933256-21-3 (English edition; no German translation exists yet)
- Jared Brown: Alan J. Pakula - His Films and his life . Back Stage Books, New York 2005, ISBN 0-8230-8799-9
- Gerard Naziri: Paranoia in American Cinema. The 1970s and the aftermath . Gardez! Verlag, Sankt Augustin 2003, ISBN 3-89796-087-7
- Henry M. Taylor: Images of the Conspiratorial. Alan J. Pakulas THE PARALLAX VIEW and the Aesthetics of Conspiracy. In: Marcus Krause, Arno Meteling & Markus Stauff (eds.): The Parallax View. On the mediology of the conspiracy . Munich: Fink, pp. 217-234. ISBN 3770549066
Web links
- The Parallax in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Witness a conspiracy in the online film database
- Parallax View: The Incredible Montage; Analysis of Glenn Erickson's parallax teaching film on the pages of DVD SAVANT (English)