Ugly Feelings

[Dave Monroe]

The Conversation (1974)

http://movieclips.com/wt89-the-conversation-movie-scene-of-the-crime/

... from Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005),
"Introduction" (pp 1-37):

"... the scene opens as Harry reenters ... the camera drops him from
its visual field as it ... pans across the ... room.  Because Harry
has abruptly disappeared from the visual field, as the pan continues
we are made to understand that we are seeing what he sees.  Without
any break in its continuity or flow, the shot has thus already
undergone a transition from objective to subjective...  But as the
camera completes its near 180-degree turn around the room, we are
surprised by Harry's sudden reappearance ....  Here the shot undergoes
its second transition, from subjective back to objective .... Harry
loses control of his own gaze--through a desubjectifying discourse
that anticipates his own eventual transformation into an object of
surveillance by the very corporation that has hired him  ...

[...]

   "Though ... alternation between subjective and objective
enunciation can be used to produce irony as well as the uncanny affect
of disconcertedness, the technique is used in The Conversation [1974]
to produce another highly permanent feeling--paranoia--that not
coincidentally replicates the subjective/oscillation in its basic
structure: Is the enemy out there or in me?" (p. 19)

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674024090

http://books.google.com/books?id=uC4wqRZzaWcC