Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation
The typical film narrative occurs in one of three primary modes. The first occurs when the director narrates the story omnisciently, moving from character to character and event to event wherein the viewer has access to all the motivations, thoughts, and feelings of the characters. The second form of narration is a third person perspective where one central character is followed. Viewers receive their perspective solely from this sentient character; we only know the story from his perceptions. The third form of narrative occurs when the events are revealed to us solely in first person form, where the story is revealed to us solely from the perspective of only one character.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, we see experimentation with the narrative form. In this film the camera and sound are used to pull the viewer into the story, to make him or her a part of the action, moods, and feelings of the story. When The Conversation was released, many critics noted that certain aspects of it, including narration, owed homage to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s films also used experimental narrative techniques. If we review Hitchcock’s description of the experimental technique he used for his own film, Sabotage, we see many similarities to the narrative technique he employed and the one used by Coppola in The Conversation:
You gradually build up the psychological situation, piece by piece, using the camera to emphasize first one detail, then another. The point is to draw the audience right inside the situation instead of leaving them watch it from outside, from a distance. You can do this only by breaking the action up into details and cutting from one to the other, so that each detail is forced in turn on the attention of the audience and reveals its psychological meaning. If you played the whole scene straight through, you would lose your power over the...