The Miraculous Manu Memorial Movie Month, Mmmmm!

The Conversation (1974)

Here, watch the opening shot, preferably in full screen:

It’s a video Where’s Waldo where you don’t know who Waldo is. There’s so much noise there might as well be no signal. Gradually, though, the camera hones in, first on a mime, then on a man in grey. Still, though, we know nothing of any of these people.

The Conversation, unlike Francis Ford Coppola’s other three 1970s films (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and I’m going to go ahead and assume The Godfather Part II) does not have a grand, epic sweep to it. It does not attempt to recreate a lifetime or an entire war. Rather, it spends its whole runtime trapped in this one moment, backtracking and analyzing, searching through the muck for the important bits, peeling back the layers only for our protagonist to find that in doing so they’ve made their whole world smaller, more claustrophobic. Contrast with the similar opening wedding scene from his previous film, The Godfather, which has roughly the same amount of chaos and moving bodies, but clears everything up very shortly, using it as a gathering of the characters who will be relevant to the rest of the story so they can be introduced.

By putting us in this lost, analytical position from the first shot, it puts us in the same headspace as the main character, and primes us for the rest of the movie, which does not fail to follow through on the opening shot’s promise. That, not just its own merits, is why this is one of the greatest opening shots of all time.

Oh, also, there’s one bit later on where Harry is talking to a girl in a green dress just outside of his so-to-speak office. Instead of just cutting from one face, to the other, with the other person’s head blurrily intruding on the furthest left or right side of the screen, and then intermittently to a shot that shows the both of them in profile, as “coverage” would dictate so the scene can be built in the edit bay, the camera starts facing the woman in green, then swings to face Harry. Then, it jump cuts back to the starting position where it’s facing the woman in green, and swings at the same slow speed to face Harry AGAIN. It does this three, maybe four times in a row. I’d have some screencaps, but it exists in motion, and there’s no videos of it online. But if you’re going to watch the movie, keep a look out for that, ‘cause it’s neat to notice when it happens.