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Overhearing (in) Touch of Evil and The Conversation:

from “real time” surveillance to its recording

David Copenhafer

To cite this article: David Copenhafer (2018) Overhearing (in) Touch of Evil and The
Conversation: from “real time” surveillance to its recording, Sound Studies, 4:1, 2-18, DOI:
10.1080/20551940.2018.1487650

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2018.1487650

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
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SOUND STUDIES
2018, VOL. 4, NO. 1, 2–18
https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2018.1487650

Overhearing (in) Touch of Evil and The Conversation: from

“real time” surveillance to its recording
David Copenhafer
Literature Department, Bard Early College Queens, Queens, NY, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Across the twentieth century cinema transitions from the depic- Received 9 January 2018
tion of surveillance as a “real time” event toward its representation Accepted 8 June 2018
as what leaves an artifact or record. This essay concerns the KEYWORDS
heightened intensity of paranoid listening, or “overhearing”, that The Conversation;
accompanies this technological change. Touch of Evil (1958) serves overhearing; point-of-
as a “transitional object”, insofar as its denouement features “real audition; sound design;
time” pursuit yet points toward a different outcome, one that surveillance; Touch of Evil
would involve analysis of the recording produced during its final
scene of surveillance. By emphasising both the return to audio via
recording as well as the unique point-of-audition of its protago-
nist, The Conversation (1974) radicalises the potential for overhear-
ing already to be found in Touch of Evil. In The Conversation,
“simple” listening becomes overhearing: a hyperbolic and para-
noid form of interpreting what has been gleaned through eaves-
dropping. Somewhat unexpectedly, it can be shown that Touch of
Evil carries within itself, in embryo, all of the ambiguity and dis-
sonance of the later film: that it, too, is fascinated by the possibility
of auditory surveillance that might become an overhearing, or
hearing awry, driven by the psychic need of the listener.

From event to record

The twentieth century history of cinematic surveillance can be divided into several
distinct modes of overlooking and of overhearing. In designating these modes one
ought to consider both the technical possibilities of the medium as well as the incor-
poration of other media into film. So, for example, there is a difference in the type of
surveillance that can be represented in the silent era versus what can happen after the
arrival of sound.1 And a major shift occurs once audio may be recorded on to tape and a
film is able to “play” voices tape recorded within its diegesis. Surveillance first appears as
an event. But as the century advances, cinematic investigators, as well as audiences,
become increasingly interested in what they are able to do in the aftermath of surveil-
lance with its record.2
To give an example of the “event” paradigm, in Modern Times (Chaplin 1936), a zealous
boss monitors the employees at his factory and disrupts, via a futuristic telescreen, the
smoke break Chaplin’s distressed character attempts to steal for himself in the workers’

CONTACT David Copenhafer copenhafer@gmail.com

Supplemental audio and video for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2018.1487650.
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 SOUND STUDIES 3

bathroom. It does not appear, however, that the panoptic overseer possesses the means by
which he could construct an archive of such moments of indolence. Rather, the event is
significant for the way it unfolds in the “present tense” of the film, that is, for the way
Chaplin’s repose is observed and interrupted in something like “real time”.3
It takes a couple of decades for surveillance to be combined with recording technol-
ogy such that a return to the scene of surveillance becomes a possibility. Touch of Evil
(Welles 1958) is one of the first films to combine surveillance with recording. The film
appears just as some of the first portable tape recorders, such as those made by Nagra,
were becoming commercially available and represents something of a “cutting edge”
use of technology. It should be noted that the proliferation of audio recording (and, by
extension, audio surveillance) anticipates the proliferation of video (more viable as a
surveillance technology than film) by several decades. The recording of audio figures
fairly prominently in midcentury US cinema and shows up as early as the denouement of
Laura (Preminger 1944), if not before. And there is a minor flurry of audio surveillant
activity in the 1970s no doubt influenced by the Watergate affair and its revelation of a
secret taping system used at the White House.4 It takes until roughly the late 1980s for
video technology to catch up and for recorded visual surveillance to become more
frequently embedded within cinema.
Though the type of technology available in a given era affects both the stories that
are told as well as the method of telling, whether one listens to a “real time” event or to
a recording of a prior event, the structure of listening itself is fundamentally one of
return. A listener’s ears are struck, and thus begins a process of attempting to identify or
decipher, as well as work with and through, a given sonic material.5 Listening confounds
the division between active and passive. One is passive toward the acoustic event, the
initial energy that strikes one’s eardrums, yet, insofar as one listens, one returns to an
analysis of the sound, chews it over, ruminates on the blow. In this sense, various
recording technologies do not constitute new capacities so much as they amplify and
extend what is already inherent to listening, its circuit of return. In returning to what has
struck the ear, a listener seeks to identify and to interpret acoustic phenomena through
an ongoing comparison of sound with previous sounds. The listening subject is always
already embedded in a sequence of listening to which it continuously returns. Listening
is listening to listening. And listening, therefore, could be likened to a form of (auto)
surveillance.
Sur écoute, by the philosopher and musicologist Peter Szendy, expresses this relation-
ship between listening and surveillance. Though it has been translated into English as All
Ears, Szendy’s key concept, surécoute, is actually a “calque”, an effort on his part to bring
the English word “overhearing” into French but with an additional meaning – not just
eavesdropping but excessive, “super” listening. Szendy writes:

Sur écoute: in two words, in French, it means that someone – a politician, a criminal, or a
journalist who is undesirable or too inquisitive – is to be surveilled, spied on, in short, placed
under suspicion or sur écoute. Mettre or placer sur écoute means to have someone’s phone
tapped.

But, as a single word, the neologism surécoute could be understood as an intensification of

listening [écoute], as its hyperbolic form, brought to incandescence, to its most extreme and
4 D. COPENHAFER

most active point. In short, surécoute as a synonym for hyperesthesia, a superlative super-
listening.6

Sur écoute and surécoute: the one who overhears is also overheard – if only by herself. At a
minimum, a listener listens to her own listening. But, in the case of non-technologised,
everyday surveillance (eavesdropping), the listener is usually close enough to her target that
she risks being overheard by that person in turn. In that case, the listener may quickly find
herself falling prey to a paranoid and imaginative listening for signs of the other’s listening. For
Szendy, listening is always structured by the listening of the one who precedes the listener.
If listening itself is prone to paranoia, perhaps even structured by paranoia, it no
doubt is all the more likely to become manifestly paranoid when the stakes are high, a
matter of life and death, as in much cinematic surveillance dealing with crime. In what
follows, I explore how the final scene of Touch of Evil constitutes a transitional moment,
one that allegorises cinema’s receding concern for surveillance as a “live” event and its
emerging interest in the product or record of surveillance. In conjunction with this
aesthetic and technological shift, what is at stake in Touch of Evil is the transition
between a mode of listening one could describe as “confident” (i.e. not wracked by
paranoid fears either that one has misheard or been overheard) and a mode of listening
– overhearing – marked by precisely such fears and anxieties.
The second, paranoid, mode of listening or “overhearing” is rendered more intense by
the audio technology that enables not just a return to sound but an amplification of
certain frequencies and an attenuation of others: a high-tech immersion in the details of
a recording. As an example of such intensive concern for the recording, I move away
from Touch of Evil to discuss in The Conversation (Coppola 1974) what I call the “agony of
playback”: the desire to attain, via a recording, to an ever truer version of events. I aim to
show, via a close reading of a few scenes, how the desire for greater understanding is
marred by the doubts and uncertainties inherent to repetitive overhearing – understood
as both surveillance and as excessive, hyperactive listening. Despite being made prior to
the revolution in digital technologies that have transformed both audio and video in the
last 30 years or so, The Conversation remains one of Hollywood cinema’s most compel-
ling examples of the “recording” paradigm: of a listening that is structured, if not ruined,
by the return to sound enhanced by technology.
One could say The Conversation “rewinds itself” by replaying its famous opening
sequence – a conversation between two people in San Francisco’s Union Square that
is recorded by surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) – several times over the
course of the film. In the manner of the photographer in Blow Up (Antonioni 1966) – a
key intertext for The Conversation – Caul returns to the conversation repeatedly both “in
his head” as well as via technology – the composite recording of the conversation
produced by his careful mixing of three source tapes which derive from three different
microphones having been present at the scene. Caul brings to these sources something
like the “dynamite of the tenth of a second” which Walter Benjamin claims that various
film processes (slow motion, close-up) introduced into our understanding of everyday
reality.7 That is, he is not satisfied with an apparently complete recording but forces
himself to delve ever deeper into the interstices of the audio in search of previously
unheard fragments – what Benjamin describes as “entirely new structural formations of
the subject”.8 While Benjamin was speaking about the visual field or what he termed
 SOUND STUDIES 5

“unconscious optics”, with some modifications, this idea could be brought to bear on
the acoustic dimension of cinema, its “unconscious acoustics” or even, since audio may
be felt as well as heard, “unconscious haptics”. Though he is ultimately depicted as a
despondent, tormented listener, preyed upon by a listening power that exceeds his
own, Harry Caul nevertheless points the way toward a practice of re-mixing cinema’s
barely heard or unheard acoustic archive. This utopian notion is at odds, however, with
Caul’s subjection to the power of surveillance at the end of The Conversation.
Somewhat unexpectedly, it can be demonstrated that Touch of Evil carries within
itself, in embryo, all of the ambiguity and dissonance of the later film, that it, too, is
fascinated by the possibility of an overhearing – surveillance – that might become an
overhearing or hearing awry – a hearing – really a listening – scored by the paranoid
imagination of the listener. The film seems taken with the power of surveillance at the
same time as it investigates the possibility of being mistaken about it, that is, the
possibility for misidentifying or mishearing what has been recorded. Touch of Evil
culminates in a killing whose sounds are captured on audio tape. Though there is no
real doubt who the killer is, the film nonetheless tantalises an audience with the
possibility that, were one to listen to the audio alone, it might not be possible to
reconstruct the event and to identify the killer. In other words, the recording might
provoke the same sort of overhearing – obsessive listening given over to paranoia and
epistemological uncertainty – which characterises The Conversation from start to finish.
As a catachresis, “overhearing” could be said to denote both a creative possibility in
listening – the Benjaminian plunge into the well of sound – as well as the potential to
import into an acoustic situation elements which would not be audible to another –
subjective auditory fantasy. Both Touch of Evil and The Conversation may be seen as
modern parables that point toward the openness of audio recording to imaginative
reinterpretation as well as to dangerous if not deadly misapprehension – to creative and
destructive forms of overhearing.

Sound evidence: Touch of Evil

In the famous long opening to Touch of Evil, the camera follows investigator Mike Vargas
(Charleton Heston) and his wife Suzy (Janet Leigh) through the streets of a Mexican
border town. The outlandish choreography of the initial tracking shot, which begins by
showing a bomb placed in the trunk of a car, seems designed to build suspense and
maintain the importance of the action as it unfolds in “real time”. But despite the power
of the camera to track its subjects throughout the opening, there is no suggestion that,
in the film’s world, this power is linked to a power of recording. Whatever the technical
prowess of the shot, it remains of a different order from the technology deployed in the
diegesis. In the world of the film and of its various police officials, there is no possibility
of a mediatised return to an analysis of the crime (the explosion of a car), no listening to
the voices of the deceased or to the “ticking noise” one of them says she has heard
throughout their brief ride.
By replacing the camera with a person – Mike Vargas – the film’s final sequence
retains its preoccupation with the drama of events as they unfold in “real time” (indeed,
Vargas will shape the closing pursuit to disastrous effect), but this time the element of
recording (audio only) is also introduced. Strangely, then, the final scene remains bound
6 D. COPENHAFER

to the logic of the “real time” event, at the same time as it points to the possibility of a
different interpretation of events enabled by their recording. Hence, the film’s status as
what I am calling an “allegory of transition”: one that retains early cinema’s interest in
movement and in pursuit while also depicting the changes brought about by emergent
media. Despite the film’s apparent confidence in technologies of recording, the final
sequence nevertheless emphasises both the ambiguity of language as well as the
inadequacy of recorded audio, its inability to offer a complete account of what has
occurred, not to speak of the possibility for silence or interference to have marred the
record of events. The ending sequence features several close ups of the recording device
itself as if to emphasise the difference between “live” sound and what may actually make
it onto the tape.9
The final pursuit takes place in a desolate landscape of abandoned buildings, trash
and oil derricks. The target of the surveillance, Hank Quinlan, has committed a murder
mere hours before and attempted to frame Suzy Vargas for the crime. It is important to
note that while the audience is aware of Quinlan’s guilt, having watched him strangle
the petty crime boss Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff), no other character has been a witness
to this crime. In other words, the audience knows Quinlan is guilty of more than a
“touch” of evil, but the film is at pains to establish two epistemological tracks: one for
the audience, the other for characters in the film.10 This distinction is crucial to an
understanding of what Touch of Evil is actually saying about the inadequacy of audio
evidence. We may know from the outset that Quinlan is guilty, but we are invited to
consider how difficult it might be to establish his guilt, by means of audio, in the world
of the fiction.
In order to establish Quinlan’s guilt, Vargas convinces Quinlan’s long-time partner,
Menzies (Joseph Gorreia), to wear a hidden microphone and draw Quinlan out into
conversation. Vargas is doubtless hoping for a full confession from Quinlan, one that will
exonerate his wife and also implicate Quinlan in a series of frame-ups stretching back
many years. The pursuit is a tour de force of direction as well as of audio and visual
editing. It is arguably even more impressive for being built upon a ludicrous oversight:
there is no reason why Vargas should be willing to allow the audio from his tape
recorder to escape into the air. Perhaps because he believes he will always be far
enough away that the machine will not be heard, he allows the audio to emerge from
a tiny speaker on the front of the recorder. An amateur magician, Welles was clearly
interested in cinematic misdirection, and one could argue that the complex editing of
the final scene distracts a viewer from its questionable premise – that an investigator
tailing a suspect would be foolish enough to allow audio to escape from his recorder. In
any case, the surveillance tape recorder heard in real time functions as the perfect
“transitional object” in this allegory of transition. It allows access to “live” sound at the
same time as that sound is being preserved for future listening.
While Vargas’s “oversight” – allowing the audio to be overheard – seems as unne-
cessary as it is reckless, it allows for several dramatic moments to arise during the
pursuit, as Vargas struggles, and fails, to prevent Quinlan from discovering the plot to
record him. Moreover, the nearly comical setup enables the filmmakers to cross-cut
between two kinds of audio: the tinny, filtered sound of the policemen’s voices heard
through a speaker and the fuller sound of their voices heard at close range. By alter-
nating between the two kinds of sound, the audience is made aware of the process of
 SOUND STUDIES 7

recording and able to pose the question of the fidelity of the tape (there are even
moments of static interference which cast doubt on its integrity). In addition, the dual
audio tracks focus attention on what Quinlan actually says and raise the question of
whether or not his speech actually constitutes an admission of wrongdoing.
The spoken evidence is fairly ambiguous. Take, for example, this exchange between
Menzies and Quinlan, apparently captured by the machine:
Menzies: Defend yourself? Hank, you must be crazy, insane.
Quinlan: Sure . . . sure I’m crazy
M: Hank, you murdered Grandi.
Q: I left my cane by his body, that was sure crazy.
While this is an important admission, it does not constitute a confession. Quinlan’s
imaginative gift is the ability to reconstruct events in such a way that either the person
he accuses looks guilty or he himself looks innocent (or both). Forgetting the cane (a
sign his ability to manipulate reality is slipping) actually constitutes something of a
leitmotiv in the film, for he is shown to do it no less than three times over its duration.
Quinlan dies before he must answer for the murder of Grandi, but one wonders how he
would have attempted to talk his way out of leaving his cane at the scene of the crime.
After killing Grandi, Quinlan himself reports the death to the police, telling his partner
where to find the body. Therefore, it would actually be quite plausible that he came
upon the murdered Grandi and left his cane there.
Later in the pursuit, this exchange occurs:
Quinlan: Look at the record. Our record, partner. All those convictions.
Menzies: Convictions. Sure. How many did you frame?
Q: Nobody.
M: Come on, Hank. How many did you frame?
Q: I told you. Nobody. Nobody that wasn’t guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Every last one of
‘em. Guilty.
M: All these years, you’ve been playing me for a sucker, faking evidence.
Q: Aiding justice, partner.
This is probably the most self-incriminating thing Quinlan says. In saying he has been
“aiding justice”, he does suggest having tampered with evidence. But might not a skilled
lawyer claim that Quinlan, if he did alter or plant evidence, only did so to convict those
about whose guilt he was already convinced? Might not such a lawyer claim that
Quinlan had first been able to establish guilt by means of other evidence, and that his
tampering served only to guarantee a conviction? And how many courts would be
willing to re-open the case of a defendant who, confronted with fictitious evidence,
nevertheless admits to the crime for which he is accused? This is, in fact, the story of
Touch of Evil. Confronted with evidence planted in his house – two sticks of dynamite –
the suspect confesses to the film’s opening explosion.
The film’s reflection on the tenuous nature of sonic evidence reaches its peak when
Quinlan discovers he is being recorded and kills Menzies for having been willing to
“wear a bug” for Vargas. Quinlan becomes aware of the recording when he hears the
echo of his own voice coming from beneath a bridge he and Menzies are crossing.
Suspicious that Vargas is hiding below, he leans over the edge, says “Vargas?” and then
8 D. COPENHAFER

hears a somewhat distant and comical repetition of his query. The unnecessary echo –
unnecessary in that Vargas should be wearing headphones or at least turning down the
volume on his machine – is the clue that allows Quinlan to unravel the pursuit. He turns
on his partner and shoots him just as Vargas leaps onto the bridge. Significantly, just
prior to Vargas’s leap, we hear the tinny sound of the argument between Quinlan and
Menzies coming from the tape recorder itself. The camera frames the recorder in a close-
up to reinforce the filtered sound of the audio. The device captures the whole affair:
Quinlan’s meditation on the echo, his argument with Menzies and the sound of him
shooting his partner.
If one were to listen to the section of the tape that begins with Quinlan leaning over
the bridge and saying Vargas’s name, the next few minutes would no doubt sound like
evidence of a crime. But it is crucial to note that, as mere audio, the recording can not be
said to incriminate Quinlan absolutely. As fantastic as it sounds, if one were to hear the
tape by itself without the film’s visual cues, one would have to entertain the possibility
that, as Quinlan would have it, it is indeed Vargas who shoots Menzies. Quinlan,
imaginative until the very end, goes so far as to shout “Vargas!” before he fires. He is
already laying the groundwork for the story he plans to tell: that Vargas killed Menzies,
and that he called out Vargas’s name in an effort to stop him from shooting. In calling
out “Vargas!”, Quinlan is clearly imagining the future use and audition of the tape in the
context of police work or at a trial proceeding. And, as the film stresses, he is an expert
at planting false evidence. While the film does not go on to explore the uncertain nature
of the sonic evidence, it is careful to plant a seed of doubt as to whether the audio alone
could have been effective at a later moment in establishing what has occurred11 [play
supplementary audio].
The film plays with the possibility of Vargas being accused of the killing by not
showing Quinlan firing the gun. Instead, the moment the gun goes off, we see
Vargas looking toward the offscreen spot where Quinlan and Menzies are standing.
Just after, the film cuts to an image of the dying Menzies, his mouth open in
apparent shock that his friend has shot him. A reverse shot then shows Quinlan
who holds the gun and looks on impassively as Menzies leaves a bloody trace on his
shooting hand. The image makes it clear enough that Quinlan has shot Menzies, but,
to repeat, the film does not emphasise what has been witnessed; rather, the visuals
point toward the possibility of a different interpretation of events on the basis of
audio evidence alone.
Quinlan will indeed make the case for a very different sequence of events, but, in a
Shakespearean twist, not without having to confront the blood on his hands. In a
gesture reminiscent of Lady Macbeth, he staggers toward a river of stagnant, dirty
water to wash off his partner’s blood. After collapsing, he is shown in close up, his
face a weathered ruin, a single tear running down his cheek. Even in extremis, however,
his imaginative gift has not yet left him:
Vargas: Well, Captain, I’m afraid this is finally something you can’t talk your way out
of.
Quinlan: You wanna bet? You killed him, Vargas.
V: Come on now. Give me my gun back.
Q: You didn’t understand me. You killed Pete. The bullet is from your gun.
 SOUND STUDIES 9

V: You think anyone would believe that?

Q: They always believe me. Anyway, they’ll never believe I killed him.

It is unclear whether the tape recorder captures this conversation. Quite possibly,
Menzies lies too far away for his microphone to pick it up. And even if the exchange
were recorded, were it to have come to a trial, it would have been one man’s word
against another’s. The tape, while damning of Quinlan, would not have been an out
and out smoking gun.
Welles’s background in theatre and in radio no doubt fed his interest in a mode of
storytelling that emphasises the “present tense” or “real time” of the fiction. One
need only think of his famous War of the Worlds broadcast (1938) to understand the
potential effect of a drama that unfolds in “real time”. While in Citizen Kane (1941),
Welles displays a complicated relationship to time and to the possibility to re-visit
the past cinematically via flashback, in Touch of Evil, the narrative moves in only one
direction. There are no flashbacks or scenes from the past (despite the unrelenting
air of nostalgia that suffuses the film and the pianola theme that is repeated several
times). Nevertheless, the film does stage a kind of “auditory flashback” and closes
with Vargas’s American friend, Schwartz (Mort Mills), playing the very recording
Vargas has just made. Schwartz arrives on the scene shortly after Menzies’s death.
The audience sees him rewind the tape and press play on the recorder. It then listens
to some of the audio it has heard only minutes before, once again hearing Quinlan’s
“confession” – his reference to “aiding justice” – his argument with Menzies, shout of
“Vargas!” and the sound of the gun going off. When Quinlan hears the sound of the
gun on the recording, he says to Menzies, who lies dead above him: “That’s the
second bullet I took for you, Pete” – a reference to his having once protected
Menzies in a gun fight. By having Quinlan reinterpret a bit of audio, the film high-
lights the inconclusive nature of audio evidence, but it is also at this moment that
what we might call Quinlan’s luck – his ability to re-mix and to reconstruct reality –
finally runs out. He cannot overturn the incontrovertible fact that Menzies lies dead
above him, that he has killed him. A few drops of blood fall from Menzies’ hand onto
Quinlan’s own. The sound of the shooting is apparently not enough to condemn
Quinlan. He does not heed the acoustic call to conscience, at least not entirely. But
the blood, the touch of evil, is too much. It appears to overwhelm Quinlan who falls
backwards into water and dies.
One could say the touch of blood draws the film to a rapid close. As a dramatist
and Shakespearean, Welles no doubt preferred this ending to a more protracted
one that could have explored the insufficiency of the tape to reconstruct reality.
But as an allegory of transition from “real time” to recording, from one technolo-
gical and auditory regime to another, Touch of Evil points the way to a very
different outcome: an aftermath in which the audio recording of a crime is returned
to again and again, the meaning of its sounds debated in ways that reveal the
fragility and uncertainty of acoustic evidence. The Conversation is the film that picks
up the tape and becomes fixated with its playback.
10 D. COPENHAFER

The agony of playback: The Conversation

“In that denouement of Touch of Evil, Welles worked out something that’s very close to my
heart because it’s so similar to the beginning of The Conversation – namely, to make the
resolution of the story depend on different shadings and perspectives of sound”.

Walter Murch12

Where Touch of Evil closes with a scene of audio surveillance, The Conversation begins as
one, although it is not really possible to comprehend this at the outset. Almost
immediately, The Conversation signals its concern for the reliability of audio evidence
(and for overhearing) by stressing point-of-audition, or the unique perspective from
which something is heard or listened to. There is a strange perspectival misfit between
the first image in the film – a high shot which slowly zooms into San Francisco’s Union
Square – and the initial audio – mostly the somewhat muffled sound of a jazz band
playing “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home?” interspersed with a few noises.
Immediately, one wonders: “who is listening?” and “who is watching?” The great height
of the opening shot is somewhat consistent with the dampened sound of the music, but
the noises on the soundtrack are harsh and electronic, inexplicable at this point. The
shot seems nearly aimless, but after more than two minutes of tracking a mime at work,
the camera begins to follow the protagonist Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), whom we will
soon learn is a surveillance expert monitoring a couple in the square.
After a continuous take of more than three minutes (reminiscent, in its length, of the
start of Touch of Evil), the opening shot cuts to one of a person on the roof of a
department store adjacent to the square. In most films, we would recognise that the
initial shot was meant to be from the perspective of the figure on the roof, an establish-
ing shot of the square leading to one that reveals who is looking at it. Here, however,
after a few more cuts, we come to realise that the angle of vision of the man on the roof
does not match the perspective of the opening shot. What does match, however, is the
audio which is continuous across the various cuts. The man on the roof of the depart-
ment store wears headphones and uses a telescopic sight and a special microphone in
an effort to capture the conversation of two people below. At least some of the audio
we have been listening to has presumably been from his highly mediated perspective,
or point-of-audition. Thus, the cut to this figure explains one enigma – the origin of the
strange audio – while leaving a second mystery unresolved: from whose point-of-view, if
anyone’s, do we observe the square initially?
Later in this scene we learn that a second observer – also in possession of a scope and
a high-powered mic – sits in another building that overlooks the square. But, like his
counterpart, his perspective is also not aligned with that of the opening shot. Even if it
were, one might well ask why would this initial observer spend so much time apparently
focused on a mime and then on Harry Caul? He might be a semi-competent employee of
Harry’s who allows his attention to wander when he should no doubt be scanning the
square in search of the target couple. But on further reflection, it seems unlikely that the
opening shot is meant to be from the perspective of a character in the fiction. Instead,
the slow zoom into the square seems intended to ease the audience into the claustro-
phobic environment of surveillance (and of paranoia) which will characterise the film
from start to finish. Furthermore, the opacity of the opening sequence is no doubt
 SOUND STUDIES 11

meant to underscore the structure of playback with which the film is so preoccupied,
that is, that one must “replay” a scene several times in order to grasp its significance.
Finally, it should be said that the opening sequence also anticipates the final shot of The
Conversation in which Harry, unable to detect a bug he knows lies hidden in his
apartment, sits dejectedly playing saxophone while the camera (in the manner of a
surveillance camera) slowly pans back and forth across his ruined home. In other words,
the cinematic apparatus itself is revealed, from the beginning – although, properly
speaking, only in retrospect – to be an instrument of surveillance analogous to those
on display in the film. That Harry should be surveilled in the film’s opening shot is a
foreshadowing of one of the film’s central dynamics, namely, that a power of surveil-
lance exists which is greater than his own.13
The retrospective clarification of the opening scene is one of the most characteristic
gestures of The Conversation, which is consumed by the “agony of playback” – the desire
to understand the true nature of events and to overcome the limitations of one’s unique
and isolated points of view and audition. The “agony of playback” refers to the possi-
bility (if not likelihood) that the more one listens, the more one overhears, each
repetition only compounding the enigmas of the prior overhearing. Initially, Harry
Caul, the surveillance and audio expert, claims to want nothing more than a “big fat
recording”. He professes to be uninterested in the content of what he records and only
interested in high fidelity. But something changes for Harry as he listens obsessively to
the recording of the couple from the square. He is consumed by a desire to comprehend
the meaning of their conversation and returns repeatedly to the recording in an effort to
improve his understanding.
In Touch of Evil, the playback of the shooting on the bridge motivates Welles’s
character, Quinlan, to stand beneath the body of his dead friend in an effort to justify
his action. There, the audio functions as a “call to conscience” or accusatory echo. In
The Conversation, audio has a similarly haunting and accusatory function for Harry
who says (in a dream) that he is not afraid of death but is afraid of murder. An
important part of the backstory to the film’s intrigue is that Harry once recorded a
man who was later killed because it was believed he had leaked information. His
entire family, in fact, was dismembered. Harry does not want to repeat this scenario
and does not want his work to lead to murder. Thus, after a failed attempt to give the
tape to his client, Harry returns to his lab to listen to it over and over in an effort to
discern the real situation, to determine if the couple he has recorded are indeed in
mortal danger.
But before returning to his lab, Harry first sees, standing in front of an elevator, Mark
(Frederic Forrest), the man he recorded in the square. Harry takes a different elevator
down, but, in a kind of nightmare logic, Ann (Cindy Williams), the woman he recorded,
boards this elevator on a lower floor. The sound of the elevator is unnaturally loud
throughout this entire sequence as if to emphasise both Harry’s rising discomfort and
the fact that he is a “sound man” to the core, one who, perhaps in the manner of a
threatened animal, is given to extraordinarily sensitive listening at moments of danger.14
The audio seems to reflect Harry’s tortured state, as it comprises not just the loud sound
of the elevator, but non-diegetic music (David Shire’s melancholy piano score) and, at
the end of the sequence, a high-pitched noise. This screech or wail is only revealed in
the next shot to be the sound of Harry’s tape machine being rewound. As with the
12 D. COPENHAFER

opening of the film, a sequence of shots enables a retrospective understanding of sound

– an overcoming of one’s limited point-of-audition – at the same time as a mystery is left
unresolved. The audience still does not know, at this juncture, the status of the couple in
the square, whether they are in danger or not.
The transition from the elevator to Harry’s workshop is notable for featuring three
distinct types of sound: (1) diegetic: the elevator, although its great volume pushes it
toward the realm of the hallucinatory; (2) non-diegetic: the piano track, highly evocative
of Harry’s psyche, insofar as it is a lone instrument and Harry is very much a lone
operator; and (3) diegetic-proleptic: the sound of a real device in the world of the film
heard prior to its being seen, indeed, heard prior to the moment the character who
hears it shares the same space as the machine (a special type of acousmatic sound, one
in which sound anticipates the space and time of its source). One is tempted to call this
last sound an interior, diegetic sound, a sound Harry hears in his head before he reaches
his lab, but it is fundamentally undecidable whether it is an interloper from another
space and time, heard only on the soundtrack and not by Harry in the elevator, or
whether it is a “real” interior sound he in some sense already hears prior to manipulating
the actual machine.
In her reading of The Conversation, Kaja Silverman lays stress on Harry’s subjection to
sound, as well as on the undecidability of the origin of various sounds which oppress him:
“Far from being in a position of secure exteriority to the sounds he manipulates, [Harry’s]
subjectivity is complexly imbricated with them – so much so that it is often impossible to
determine which originate from ‘outside’ of him, and which from ‘inside’”.15 The confusion
of exterior and interior sounds becomes most pronounced when Harry returns to listen to
the tape.16 Retroversion, rewinding, is the gesture par excellence of attempting to gain
mastery over sound.17 After listening several times to a segment of the tape which seems
to contain a garbled communication from Mark to Ann, Harry finally finds what would
appear to be a technical solution to the interference. After applying a kind of filter to the
sound, he is able to hear Mark say to her: “He’d kill us if he got the chance”. In its final
iteration, the line sounds clear and uninterrupted, but it is important to recognise that the
line may be as much of an interior voice, one Harry needs to hear, as it is an exterior voice
others would hear in the same way. Harry’s attempts at overhearing move inexorably
toward a hearing in excess of itself. They should be understood, thematically, in relation to
his guilt over the use to which his work has been put in the past and, rhetorically, in
relation to the acoustic design of his experience on the elevator.
When Harry boards the elevator, he is clearly disturbed. He wants, for whatever
reason, to find some evidence that Ann and Mark are in danger. Perhaps he wishes to
atone for the awful deaths for which he was somewhat responsible in the past. Possibly,
as he stands next to Ann, he begins to feel some sympathy or attraction for the woman
he has taped. Or perhaps, as Silverman argues, Harry longs to be blanketed by a
comforting female voice, the model for which is the maternal voice, and, having listened
so closely and intently to Ann, who expresses a kind of maternal solicitude both for a
homeless man in the square and for the man who would seem to be her boyfriend,
Harry does not want to see her come to harm, to do damage to her voice. Of course,
these three “thematic” elements are not mutually exclusive.
On the “rhetorical” side, the sound design of the elevator scene suggests that the film
does not articulate sound in the typical way, that is, one cannot take for granted that
 SOUND STUDIES 13

everyone hears events in an identical fashion. No one, for example, is likely to hear the
elevator the way Harry does. The film is at pains to establish Harry’s point-of-audition as
influential on the relative volume and intensity of several “incidental” sounds: train
noises, passing cars, music, etc.18 Significantly, when Harry isolates the crucial line, he
is alone. No one else is there to comment on it or to second his interpretation of it. Later
in the film, other characters, including his client (“the director”) will hear the line, but
Harry’s presence in such scenes generates the possibility that only he hears it with the
same clarity and stress with which the audience hears it. In other words, it is arguable
that Harry’s point-of-audition governs the audibility of nearly the entire film. At the limit,
it is even possible no one else hears the line about killing, as it is never commented on
explicitly.
Nowhere in the film is Harry’s unique point-of-audition given greater emphasis than
in the scene in which he goes to the Jack Tar Hotel to eavesdrop on what he fears may
be a violent confrontation between his client and the couple from the square. From an
adjacent room, Harry listens to the client play back to Ann, apparently his wife, the very
tape Harry has made. Harry hears the two argue and struggle. He then rips off his
headphones and seems to want to ignore the situation but eventually makes his way on
to a balcony just outside. There, he sees a hand trace a bloody smear on a glass partition
separating his part of the balcony from the part belonging to the adjacent room. At the
moment the hand appears, we hear a woman scream and, indeed, can just make out
Ann’s form beyond the glass. The implication is that she is being attacked, and the
soundtrack underscores this notion by picking up the sound of her real scream and
turning it into an even higher pitched electronic wail. Just as the scene in the elevator
ends with a sound apparently “introduced” by Harry’s psyche, this scene also moves
towards a high pitched sound related to Harry’s mental state. The border between
the human scream and the electronic one is so thin, however, that it is impossible to
hear exactly when the human voice leaves off and the electronic sound takes over [play
supplementary video].
The distorted, electronic cry is clearly meant to convey Harry’s nearly psychotic state
of mind at this point. While it is inspired by a real scream, it is unclear if any real
screaming is supposed to go on while it repeats accompanied by a kind of metallic
clanging. One could posit that Harry hears the real scream and overhears its echoes, that
is, hears them as projections or fantasy. In this regard, one should note the feminised,
high-pitched quality of the secondary screams which mimic Ann’s scream. Harry believes
she has been attacked, probably killed, and the electronic timbre of the echoes are
perfectly suited to this belief, for his electronic surveillance has led to this bloody
outcome. After seeing the bloody hand, Harry collapses for an indefinite period of
time. Afterwards, he breaks into the adjacent room to look for clues as to what has
occurred. He is, of course, looking primarily for blood, and the scene recalls Psycho in its
emphasis on the shower as a possible locus of horror.19
During Harry’s search for blood, The Conversation could have taken a very similar turn
to Touch of Evil and produced blood as a kind of insurmountable signifier of violence
and guilt. In an eerie allusion to Psycho, Harry runs his finger along the drain of the tub,
but no blood stains his hand. The killers seem to have done a very thorough job of
cleaning up after themselves. On the point of leaving, Harry checks one last thing: the
toilet. The film is careful to show Harry, on entering the bathroom, attempting to flush
14 D. COPENHAFER

the toilet which does not work. So it seems likely that when it begins to pour forth a
great quantity of blood this is a pure hallucination on Harry’s part. The soundtrack
underscores the highly subjective character of this bloody shot by repeating the sound
of the electronic scream Harry hears on the balcony. If the sound is imaginary, over-
heard, then the visual seems likely to be imaginary as well.
In Touch of Evil, blood signifies the incontrovertible truth that Quinlan has killed his
partner and friend. In The Conversation, blood instead points to Harry’s highly distressed
state of mind. In both instances, blood is a sign of guilt, but Harry’s agony is misplaced.
The high-pitched, feminised nature of the screams he hears suggests he believes Ann
has been killed, but this is not the case. On the contrary, she and Mark appear to have
conspired to kill Harry’s client. Only after Harry sees them both alive does he realise how
badly he has misunderstood the situation. A chaotic scene in which Ann tries to fend off
a mob of reporters is intercut with shots from both the initial conversation in Union
Square as well as shots showing Harry’s client being attacked in his hotel room. At this
point, the notion of retroversion, of rewinding or replaying, reaches its peak, for Harry
hears the crucial line “He’d kill us if he got the chance” with its “correct” emphasis “He’d
kill us if he got the chance”. This terrible reworking of the sound reveals his concern for
the couple to have been entirely misplaced. He has overheard the line, overheard the
scream. They have been plotting murder all along. Playback, Harry realises, was his first
mistake, one that has taken him down a path he no doubt wishes he could return to the
start of.

Error, or point-of-audition
Although separated by nearly 20 years, both Touch of Evil and The Conversation seem
animated by faith in the evidentiary value of audio recording at the same time that they
raise questions about how reliable audio evidence can be. Touch of Evil questions the
value of audio evidence in sly fashion, by means of the contrast between the confidence
of the lead investigator in his surveillance and the very shooting and recording style of
the film.20 As we have seen, that style, careful to keep an actual killing offscreen, pushes
the film’s audience to imagine the contents of a surveillance tape and to admit their
inadequacy.
The Conversation radicalises the potential for overhearing already to be found in
Touch of Evil. It does so by highlighting Harry Caul’s agonised return to the tape he
himself has assembled, his obsessive practice of replaying the conversation and working
with it to achieve greater fidelity to the original event. In addition, the later film links
overhearing to Harry’s unique point-of-audition in a way that exceeds the compass of
the earlier work. By sometimes framing the recording device, as well as by changing the
quality of the audio, Welles demonstrates in Touch of Evil an interest in point-of-audition.
He no doubt wishes to telegraph the precarity of the recording as well as the singularity
of listening. But point-of-audition does not quite rise to the level of an organising
principle as it does in The Conversation.
While it takes relatively little effort to represent a character’s point-of-view, it can be
difficult, in many common cinematic situations, to represent point-of-audition. Take, for
example, the fairly common occurrence of several characters holding a conversation
together in a room. One character says something important. How could one indicate
 SOUND STUDIES 15

that not everyone has heard the sentence in the same way or with the same stress?
Probably there are ways involving repetition and close ups on ears to indicate a
particular character is listening, but they would be likely to appear clumsy. Instead,
the moment a character speaks around others, one tends to believe one has heard the
“objective” version of the enunciation, the version to which all participants in the scene
would agree. One of the great strengths of The Conversation is that it isolates Harry Caul
so often and to such a degree that his point-of-audition blends seamlessly with the
“objective” sound of events. His “error” becomes one that anyone watching the film can
make.
If one were to intercept the written message “He’d kill us if he got the chance”, it
would be at least partially unreadable insofar as the stress could fall either on “kill” or on
“us”. The Conversation takes this basic unreadability of the statement a step further by
saying, even with the passage from inscription to enunciation, a listener can still make a
mistake, not hear the sentence correctly and put the emphasis in the wrong place. This is
the element of human error, of the possibility for the listening subject to overhear what
he or she wants or needs to hear: a tendency that speaks against the allure of
surreptitious recording as the shortest path to the truth about others.
In our era, more than 40 years after the release of The Conversation, a new lure has
been added to the old one, namely, the hope that automation, computerised scanning
of phone calls and phone call records, can substitute for the need for human ears and
human interpretation in the “war on terror”. This “subject-less” listening is, in fact, what
is anticipated by the opening shot of The Conversation – and also, truth be told, the first
shot of Touch of Evil – a shot, as we noted previously, of total surveillance from no one’s
point of view, from the point of view of the apparatus itself. If we were to heed the
warning of these two films, we would not be so quick to hand our interpretive faculties
over to machines, but would instead admit that reading is what is required by the
unreadability of faces, inscriptions, voices and gestures. Close, time-consuming, patient
reading is the only just response to the world we have created, overwhelmed by data,
and so quick to be divided into friends and enemies.

Notes
1. Though stark, the sound design of Fritz Lang’s M, could hardly be more effective in its
economy. The obsessive killer whistles a distinctive tune – Grieg’s “In the Hall of the
Mountain King” – that leads to his identification (by a blind man) and eventual
capture.
2. In his compelling micro-history of cinematic surveillance as it plays out between roughly
1990 and 2000 (“Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of
‘Real Time’”), Tom Levin posits a third type of relationship between cinema and surveillance.
During the last decade of the twentieth century, he claims, surveillance cinema pivots away
from concern for the recorded event to emphasise the “real time” unfolding of action as
seen from the perspective of one or more potential (or “real”) diegetic surveillance cameras.
For Levin, the shift to a “real time” surveillance aesthetic is meant to compensate for the
loss, associated with the rise of digital technology, of “reality effect” previously attributed to
the photogram – the photographic basis of the original “cinema”. While I agree that a “real
time” surveillance aesthetic informs recent cinematic and especially televisual production, I
think it is worth asking to what extent a narrative as well as a discursive concern for
recordings – whether audio or video – travels against the grain of that aesthetic.
16 D. COPENHAFER

Moreover, I wonder to what extent the rise of a “real time” surveillance aesthetic represents
a reaction not just to the loss of “reality effect” associated with photography but to the
assault on “reality” audible in such films as Touch of Evil and The Conversation.
3. “Real time” is a flexible concept which would have to be modified to reflect the significance
of television as well as the possibility for “live” monitoring via CCTV or the internet. For the
purposes of this essay, “real time” means more or less “the present” of the fiction, even if
that present may be interrupted or elided by editing. Interestingly, one of the more
memorable scenes in Modern Times finds Chaplin drawn into the gears of the machine
that feeds his assembly line. While the scene does not feature a return to previous audio, it
does take a “rewinding” of the film for Chaplin to escape the clutches of the machine.
Though the overall sequence concerns the inexorable, “one way” flow of factory time, the
scene thus figures the openness of cinematic technique to a different experience of time
marked by repetition, looping, inversion, etc.
4. See especially Alan Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy”: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All
the President’s Men (1976).
5. This threefold structure can be found in Roland Barthes’s “Listening” in The Responsibility of
Forms, 245–260.
6. Szendy, All Ears, 11. Translation modified.
7. Benjamin writes: “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of
familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the
camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule
our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of
action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our
railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came
the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so
that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go
traveling”. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 236.
8. Ibid.
9. In an article on the instability of the racialised voice in Touch of Evil, Tony Grajeda also takes
note of the final scene’s emphasis on sound technology: “What the film points to here, at
least in so far as sound itself becomes the subject of the film, is the degree to which
technological mediation has become the reality of experiencing sound”. Grajeda, “A
Question of the Ear,” 216.
10. The title “Touch of Evil” works on numerous registers. Among them, it very likely refers to
Quinlan’s preferred mode of killing: strangulation.
11. In writing of the influence of radio on film noir, Neil Verma refers to a scene at the end of
The Big Sleep in which Humphrey Bogart’s character, Marlowe, manipulates by means of
gunshots some listeners at a distance. The use of “offscreen” gunshots is related to
Quinlan’s efforts to control the interpretation of reality in Touch of Evil. See Verma, “Radio,
Film Noir, and the Aesthetics of Auditory Spectacle”.
12. Quoted in Ondaatje, The Conversations, 194. Credited with “sound montage” on The
Conversation, Walter Murch supervised the “restoration” of the original sound design to
Touch of Evil (re-released in 1998). I would like to acknowledge Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman
whose posting of 18 July 2011 – “Play it again (and again), Sam: The Tape Recorder in Film (Part
Two on Walter Murch)” – on the website Sounding Out! brought this quotation to my attention.
13. In Surveillance Cinema, Catherine Zimmer offers a different interpretation, taking the open-
ing shot to be from the point of view of one of Harry’s associates. While Zimmer and I
disagree about the nature of the visual, we are in substantial agreement concerning the
meaning of the audio in the sequence. Zimmer writes: “this scene (and the rest of the film)
highlights the degree to which the smooth unfolding of the images is completely depen-
dent on the sound engineering that The Conversation suggests is also the work of audio
surveillance: the construction and reconstruction of sound from several sources to serve as a
kind of architecture without which the narrative becomes structurally unsound”. See
 SOUND STUDIES 17

Zimmer, Surveillance Cinema, 19. For a third detailed reading of the opening, see Carolyn
Anderson, “The Conversation as Exemplar and Critique of Sound Technology”.
14. For an intense literary portrait of such a creature, see Kafka’s story “The Burrow”.
15. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 96.
16. In Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai makes a similar point about The Conversation’s confusion of
objectivity and subjectivity. Where Silverman and I stress the confusion of objective and
subjective sound, Ngai, through a close reading of a “silent” scene, highlights a visual
confusion. In her reading, the camera shows Harry Caul entering a hotel room, then pans
away as if to reveal Caul’s subjective point of view, only to have Caul re-appear in the frame
after the “subjectivising” pan. Ngai writes: “the shot’s cunning re-objectivisation suggests
just how uncertain this surveillance expert’s grasp of the visual field has perhaps been all
along”. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 18–19.
17. Toward the beginning of the film, Harry is shown playing saxophone along with a record.
Though today the turntable has been displaced by other technologies, it remains a fairly
common technique among musicians to pick a needle up and drop it back, or to perform
the digital equivalent, to replay the same cut or passage and attempt to imitate or surpass it
on their own instrument.
18. In a fascinating scene toward the film’s middle, Harry has an intimate conversation with
Meredith, a woman who will both seduce him and steal the tape he has withheld from his
client, “the director”. As Harry talks to Meredith, we notice how background sounds and
diegetic music recede as if to signify his desire to share a private space with her. Prior to
their most intimate exchange, however, the sound of ice cubes in their glasses is maybe a
touch too loud. As with other sonic mysteries in the film, we only discover later the origin of
this odd detail. Another surveillance professional has hidden a microphone, disguised as a
pen, in Harry’s breast pocket. The ice cubes clink loudly next to this mic. What is disconcert-
ing about the audio mix here is that no one in the world of the film seems at this moment
to be listening to the sounds passing through this mic and being recorded by a remote tape
recorder. Only the audience – identified, at least in part, with a machine of which it has no
knowledge – hears this way.
19. The emphasis on screaming is also, of course, a reference to Psycho. It is worth noting that, in
the earlier film, image and audio are inextricably linked (although the soundtrack provides an
eerie surplus): one sees Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh) open mouth and hears her scream
throughout the attack on her. In The Conversation, one strains to see Ann through a translucent
partition and wonders if, indeed, it is her scream represented by the electronic soundtrack. The
horror of the first film is “real”; the horror of the second “virtual”.
20. Just before the close of the film, Vargas’s American friend, Schwartz, arrives on the scene
and asks him: “You sure you got enough [evidence on tape]?” With confidence, Vargas
replies: “More than enough. It’s all on the tape. Play it back. You’ll see”.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Bard College for its support as well as the Program in Cinema Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania for inviting me to deliver a version of this essay as a talk. I also wish to
thank Adrian Daub, Johanna Gosse and Rebecca Sheehan for comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
18 D. COPENHAFER

Notes on contributor
David Copenhafer is an Assistant Professor in the Literature Department at Bard Early College
Queens. His writing, which has appeared in various print and online publications, concerns the
manifestation of sound and music in nineteenth and twentieth century literature and film.

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