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Zahlen, bitte! – 109 minutes of thriller with watergate-like surveillance
In the fall of 1974, a film was released in West German cinemas that showed all the high-tech tools of surveillance technology for the first time. “The Conversation” (German title: Der Dialog) by Francis Ford Coppola showed the work of wiretapping specialist Harry Caul, who is ordered by a “director” to monitor a couple in a public space.
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In this section, we present amazing, impressive, informative and funny figures (“Zahlen”) from the fields of IT, science, art, business, politics and, of course, mathematics every Tuesday.
The wordplay “Zahlen, bitte!” for a section about numbers is based on the ambiguity of the German word “Zahlen.” On one hand, “Zahlen” can be understood as a noun in the sense of digits and numerical values, which fits the theme of the section. On the other hand, the phrase “Zahlen, bitte!” is reminiscent of a waiter’s request in a restaurant or bar when they are asked to bring the bill. Through this association, the section acquires a playful and slightly humorous undertone that catches the readers’ attention and makes them curious about the presented numbers and facts.
The film, which was nominated for three Oscars and had already won the Palme d’Or for Best Film in Cannes, was interpreted in West Germany as a critique of the surveillance state against the backdrop of the Watergate scandal. In the GDR, it was only shown in 1976 after being checked by the State Security Service and was rated as critical of capitalism.
Coppola, who shot The Conversation between the first and second parts of the “The Godfather” series, was inspired by other films, in particular Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film “Blow Up”. In this film, a photographer discovers that his photographs in a park could show a murder.
Idea for the film through modern audio surveillance
He discussed the idea for the film with the film director Irwin Kirshner. They were concerned with the question of how such a plot could be solved in a more “cinematic” way. Kirshner pointed out to him the possibilities of modern eavesdropping techniques:
“We were talking about espionage, and he said that most people thought the safest way not to be bugged was to walk in a crowd, but he had heard that there were microphones that were able to pick up certain voices in a crowd. And I thought: Wow, that’s a great subject for a movie – and that’s where it started.”
From 1966 to 1970, Coppola wrote a screenplay and familiarized himself with the technical possibilities. This brought him together with the private detective Hal Lipset, who had already warned of the dangers of acoustic surveillance in 1960 in the anthology “The Eavesdroppers”, but used it unabashedly in his own work. Lipset caused a sensation when he prepared a cocktail olive with a microphone and used the skewer as an antenna. Coppola hired Lipset as chief consultant for The Conversation.
In her Lipset biography “The Bug in the Olive”, Patricia Holt (a philosophy professor who retrained as a private detective) claims that all but two of the details shown in the film were state-of-the-art eavesdropping systems of the time. Only the fast rewind to memory points and the directional microphones that look like precision weapons were still a thing of the future when the film was shot in 1972. This is remarkable in that, after the Watergate scandal in 1974, it emerged that the bugging system installed in the White House under US President Nixon was almost identical to the technology shown in Coppola’s film.
In the DVD commentaries on The Conversation, Coppola was shocked by the similarity of the surveillance in Watergate. Thus, the film seemed like a reaction to the Watergate affair, even though it was made public when the film was two-thirds complete.
Technical progress improved the artistic presentation
When filming began, transistors were introduced into film technology. The first programmable zoom lenses were created, which Coppola and especially his first cameraman Haskell Wexler worked with extensively. The opening scenelasting exactly three minutes, of the hustle and bustle on Union Square in San Franciscoin which the cameras zoom down from a great height onto the actor Robert Shields and the interceptor Harry Caul in his Macintosh raincoat, is one of the iconographic moments in film history.
Union Square in San Francisco, taken from the St. Francis Hotel sometime in 1968, where the iconic crowd scene was filmed.
(Image: CC-BY SA 2.0, Roger Wollstadt)
Six zoom cameras were used for four days to capture the scene, which was to take place among normal, uninstructed passers-by. The actors playing the monitors with the directional microphones on the windows were arrested by police officers who suspected an assassination attempt. Today, such a scene would be filmed in an instant with a drone, just as the use of surveillance cameras with motion sensors filmed by Coppola at a fictitious security fair has long since become commonplace.
The film’s piano music, composed by Coppola’s brother-in-law, also lasts exactly three minutes, but is extended by a sequence in which, at the end, the devastated surveillance officer Harry Caul plays his saxophone alongside the piano. He and his team have eavesdropped on a walking couple on behalf of a “director” and distilled a sentence from the audio material with the help of filters that will haunt him throughout the film: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.”
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The loner Caul interprets the sentence, which is repeated endlessly in the film with the emphasis on “kill”: the couple are to be killed by someone on behalf of the director. He rents a room in a hotel where the couple want to meet and witnesses an act of violence until he turns the TV set with Nixon on the news to maximum volume and crawls into bed. When he enters the neighboring room the next day, everything looks fine until he flushes the toilet and blood overflows.
Editing and reshoots by sound engineer
As Coppola was immediately busy with the second part of “The Godfather” after the end of filming, sound engineer Walter Murch also took on the editing and re-shooting of the film. It took him a whole year. Murch cut many scenes and rearranged a dream sequence with which Coppola wanted to end the film. Murch himself was not satisfied with the sound quality of the Union Square shot and re-recorded the couple’s dialog in a quiet park.
Caution, spoiler!
The sentence was spoken with the emphasis on “us”. At the end of the movie, Harry Caul hears this variation and now understands that he has misheard (the different emphasis can only be heard in the original). It is the couple who have successfully got rid of the ominous director. Back in his apartment, he learns that he himself is being monitored and bugged and should keep quiet. Caul sets off in search of the microphone, gradually dismantling his apartment in the process. In the end, he plays his saxophone accompanied by a piano chord. To this day, Coppola fans are still discussing where the bug could be hidden.
(mki)
