{"product_id":"conversation-6","title":"Conversation","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA minute-by-minute analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid thriller \u003ci\u003eThe Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e (1974). \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBlending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the \u003ci\u003eTimecodes \u003c\/i\u003eseries focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen it was released, \u003ci\u003eThe Conversation \u003c\/i\u003edepicted 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e50 years later, Coppola’s masterpiece didn’t just record the spirit of the age, he also had an ear toward the future, as \u003ci\u003eThe Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e also managed to prefigure the isolated reactionaries of the internet, with Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul as a kind of pre-digital online troll whose self-righteousness and interpersonal failings shape his reactionary interpretation of events in which he’s only a peripheral participant. Harry both predicts the behavior of social media bullies and bots but also definitively shows that the internet did not create these characters; it merely amplifies them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUltimately, \u003ci\u003eThe Conversation: Movies Minute by Minute \u003c\/i\u003eshows 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloomsbury Publishing Plc","offers":[{"title":"Default Product","offer_id":57533254074712,"sku":"9798765149416","price":22.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9798765149416.jpg?v=1781784092","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/conversation-6","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}