Science on Screen: Surveillance, Doubt, and Francis Ford Coppola’s "The Conversation"
From traffic cameras and video doorbells to ride sharing apps and “Find My Friends,” surveillance technologies have become increasingly embedded in our everyday lives, collecting data about where people are, what they are doing, and who they are with. But what are the consequences of this intensive data collection? What happens when these technologies are used to enforce rules, make decisions about people, and dictate behavior?
In this Science on Screen event, Dr. Karen Levy, Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell and associate member of the faculty of Cornell Law School, will discuss the social and ethical aspects of data-intensive technologies through the lens of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974).
The film stars the late Gene Hackman as lonely wiretapping expert and devout Catholic Harry Caul, who has a crisis of conscience after realizing that the recordings he is creating for a shadowing company may be putting the lives of a couple in danger. Centering both the mechanics and ethical consequences of surveillance, this taught psychological thriller remains a potent exploration of privacy and paranoia from the Watergate era.
Dr. Levy will discuss how data generated through surveillance technologies is used to control human behavior, focusing on the power of uncertainty about what data is being collected and about whom, and connecting the themes of the film to the ubiquity of surveillance in daily life.
Free admission! Science on Screen® is an initiative of the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with major support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Part of our "Science on Screen" program. Courtesy of Rialto Pictures.
About the Speaker
Karen Levy is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, and associate member of the faculty of Cornell Law School. She researches how law and technology interact to regulate social life, with particular focus on social and organizational aspects of surveillance. Much of Dr. Levy's research analyzes the uses of monitoring for social control in various contexts, from long-haul trucking to intimate relationships. She is also interested in how data collection uniquely impacts, and is contested by, marginalized populations. Levy is the author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance. She is a New America Fellow and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Coppola's The Conversation screens in a 4K restoration, courtesy of Rialto Pictures. The restoration was by American Zoetrope, in collaboration with Studiocanal at Roundabout Entertainment and American Zoetrope laboratories, from the original negative accessed for the first time. An approved 35mm reference print was used for the color grading and the 5.1 soundtrack was created in 2000 by Walter Murch. The restoration was approved by Francis Ford Coppola.