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The Conversation

Movies Minute by Minute
By Jonathan Russell Clark
Series: Timecodes
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Brief Description
A minute-by-minute analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid thriller The Conversation (1974). Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing... Read More
Format: Hardback
$26600

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A minute-by-minute analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 paranoid thriller The Conversation.

A minute-by-minute analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 paranoid thriller The Conversation.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

A minute-by-minute analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid thriller The Conversation (1974).

Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits.

When it was released, The Conversation depicted the isolation and loneliness caused by a surveillance state we ourselves, unwittingly or not, are agents in. It examined the ways in which technological progress can outpace the culture it ostensibly aids, and how our increased awareness of these increasingly undetectable innovations doesn’t necessarily help us avoid their lenses. Harry Caul, in an underrated performance by Gene Hackman, is the best in the bugging business, and yet, by the end, even he can’t figure out how he himself has been surveilled. It is a potent parable of Nixon’s America.

Fifty years later, Coppola’s masterpiece didn’t just record the spirit of the age, he also had an ear toward the future, as The Conversation also managed to prefigure the isolated reactionaries of the internet. With Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul as a kind of pre-digital online troll, his self-righteousness and interpersonal failings shape his reactionary interpretation of events in which he’s only a peripheral participant. Harry both predicts the behaviour of social media bullies and bots but also definitively shows that the internet did not create these characters; it merely amplifies them.

Ultimately, The Conversation: Movies Minute by Minute shows how Coppola’s taut narrative of ambiguity, paranoia, and subjectivity is utterly a movie of its moment and yet has reverberated long after its release in a way few films ever do.

Series: Timecodes

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9798765149423

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 29 October 2026

Country: United States

Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic

Illustration: 11 bw illus

Audience: Tertiary education

DIMENSIONS

Width: 127.0mm

Height: 205.0mm

Weight: 300g

Pages: 144

Collections

Arts & Culture Jonathan Russell Clark Non-Fiction Series: Timecodes

About the Author

Jonathan Russell Clark is a writer and film critic living in the United States.

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