The Conversation

At the height of his stardom, Gene Hackman turned inward for one of his most enigmatic roles: Harry Caul, a reclusive surveillance expert hired to record a seemingly mundane conversation that slowly unravels him. As he pores over fragments of sound, professional detachment gives way to guilt, obsession, and the creeping fear that he’s complicit in something he can’t fully grasp. A kind of sonic cousin to Antonioni’s Blow-Up, The Conversation is a taut, formally exact thriller of paranoia and moral confusion, shaped by David Shire’s minimalist score  and meticulously engineered sound design that vibrates with lonely dread. A landmark of defeatist ’70s American cinema, with Hackman at his most restrained and riveting.

Annette Insdorf is Professor of Film at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and Moderator of the popular “Reel Pieces” series at the 92nd Street Y, where she has interviewed 300 film celebrities. She is the author of the landmark study, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel); Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski; Francois Truffaut, a study of the French director’s work; Philip Kaufman, and Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has. Her latest book is Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes, currently in its fourth printing.