Conversation no.1 by sandra46
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Description
This is a shot from one side of the large central flowerbed in the same Venetian walled garden. It was mid-May and the roses were at their best. The women chatting on the bench opposite to me were two of my mates at an eight- week seminar. As soon as I saw this shot I thought of the famous film The Conversation. In particular, the scene when Caul/Hackman and his associates follow a couple around a park using three separate microphones to listen to their conversation.
The Conversation is a 1974 mystery thriller about audio surveillance, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It won the Golden Palm at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, and in 1995, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Coppola has cited Blowup (1966)by Michelangelo Antonioni,as a key influence on his conceptualization of the film's themes, such as surveillance versus participation, and perception versus reality. The film is the slowly-gripping, bleak study of electronic surveillance and threat of new technologies that is examined through the private, internalized life of a lonely and detached expert bugger. It was produced and released by director Francis Ford Coppola before and during the Wategate era (and between his two Godfather films) - a time of heightened concern over the violation of civil liberties. Its claustrophobic themes of the destruction of privacy, alienation, guilt, voyeurism, justified paranoia, unprincipled corporate power and personal responsibility effectively responded to growing, ominous 20th century threats of eavesdropping to personal liberties. This film has been influencial. In the X-Files episode "E.B.E.", FBI Agent Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny), while searching for evidence of electronic surveillance in his apartment, tears his living quarters asunder in a manner similar to Harry Caul's ransacking of his own apartment. X-Files creator Chris Carter has acknowledged the scene was an homage to The Conversation. In series 1, episode 3 of British comedy Spaced, a man bearing a striking resemblance to Harry Caul can be seen listening to a conversation taking place in the main characters' flat. The Industrial music band Clock DVA uses an extended sample of a Harry Caul monologue on the track The Connection Machine from their 1989 album Buried Dreams. It also influenced the 1998 spy thriller Enemy of The State. More about that to come.
Thank you for your kind comments.
Comments (39)
bazza
Superb shot love those beautiful roses, well done!!
renecyberdoc
great tidbit of information and waht coppola meant became reality or even more,you can not even leave a "wind or poop" without a satellite noticing it. i live a regulkar life with nothing to hide but this frightens me nonetheless. and then people having access to whatever of your records ,health and financial situation and the lot.
myrrhluz
Great capture! I love that you look through the garden of roses to see the two people conversing.
ragouc
Nice shot.
amota99517
Outstanding shot!
ShadowsNTime
Sweet capture Sandra! Very interesting about the movie. Isn't it funny what things strike us when we see an image? Their posture suggest to me that whatever they are discussing is of a very personal nature, the girl with the slumped shoulders seems sad.
bebert
superbe photo !!
lucindawind
such a lovely shot !
anahata.c
You have to know, the image itself is beautiful & lush, and the conversation in the background is but a moment in a plethora of life. I can see "The Conversation" comparison readily. But I don't get the feeling of anyone spying on these two, so much as someone (you) enveloping them in the cradle of lush nature. You could even be giving a loving hug to your subjects, rather than being a voyeur. It's a loving shot! But every photographer is a Harry C. looking in on other lives, in a way. And so are painters, writers, musicians, etc, if you see art as a record of the inner journeys we all have. Wouldn't it be an interesting film if Caul turned out to be an artist, whose art was bits & pieces of the human condition? When I composed (I was a classical musician years back), we recorded street sounds and made compositions out of them. I can't tell you how many times It struck us that we were using bits of actual lives for our art; and we suddenly felt very cheap. Mind you, our mikes were visible, so people had the option of shutting-up as they passed...but we were Harry Cauls all the same (truly), in how we gathered bits of their lives and then zeroed-in on what we wanted & discarded the rest...At one point, we stopped because it just felt strangely 'creepy'! Lots of stuff to think about...But your image has beauty & lushness; and the two people against that beautiful soiled wall are another piece of life unfolding in the whole. That's photographic 'seeing'. Lovely & another fav. (I see the time & I must go—I have some Rosity artists visiting in about 2 hours! But I'll be back. I've caught up so slowly, gallery by gallery—you're in the "S"s, sorry! you're near the bottom, next time I'll start with "Z"!—that I've still not gotten to all I've wanted to see. I'll be back again soon for more of your scintillating journeys, all so well done & thoughtful. But a beautiful image, this. Lush & very gentle...)