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B

y the age of 35, Jacques
Tissot was one of the
most sought-after soci-
ety portraitists in
Paris. But in 1871, after
the defeat of France in its war
against Prussia and the fall of the
revolutionary Paris Commune, he
moved to London, where he remade
himself as James Tissot, a narrative
painter in the Victorian style. The
new exhibition “James Tissot: Ambig-
uously Modern,” opening at Paris’s
Musée D’Orsay on March 24, aims to
bring both halves of his career to-
gether. “Most of the art historians
who have studied Tissot’s work over
the last few years have been British,
whose focus has been almost entirely
on the Victorian period of the artist
when he was in London,” says Ma-
rine Kisiel, one of the show’s cura-
tors. “We wanted to shift this per-
spective by demonstrating that
Tissot had a long career in different
stages.”
In particular, the show empha-
sizes the modernist elements in his
work. “His paintings are full of ironic
allusions, innuendo and word-
games,” says Cyrille Sciama, a co-cu-
rator of the show, which includes 130
works by Tissot, from oil paintings
to etchings, watercolors, caricatures
and decorative enamelwork.
Many of the portraits Tissot made
after arriving in London depicted life
on or around the Thames. “The Gal-
lery of H.M.S. Calcutta” (ca. 1877),
the image chosen by the curators to
promote the exhibition, depicts two
resplendently dressed women in con-
versation with a young naval officer.
“There’s an erotic charge in this
painting which is ironic at the same
time,” Mr. Sciama says. He is con-
vinced the title of the painting in-
volves a deliberate pun: The women’s
rear ends are prominent in the com-

IN THE 1970S,when few directors
were as widely recognized or ad-
mired, Francis Ford Coppola di-
rected a grand total of four movies.
Three of them—“The Godfather”
(1972), “The Godfather Part II”
(1974) and “Apocalypse Now”
(1979)—are, by wide consensus, re-
garded as classics, each having se-
cured spots in both the 1998 and
2007 editions of the American Film
Institute’s ranking of all-time best
films.
Yet, during that decade, Mr. Cop-
pola was not exclusively preoccu-
pied with the fashioning of epics. In
addition to his sweeping consider-
ations of such vast topics as orga-
nized crime and the Vietnam War,
Mr. Coppola wrote and directed
“The Conversation” (1974), an inti-
mately proportioned sketch of San
Francisco surveillance expert Harry
Caul (Gene Hackman), who rightly
takes pride in his craft but overesti-
mates its capacity to illuminate hu-
man affairs. Toward the end of the
film, Caul finds himself on the re-
ceiving end of the sort of surveil-
lance tactics he himself had mas-
tered.
To be sure, the film was honored
in its day: During the same cere-
mony where Mr. Coppola was
awarded Oscars for Best Picture,
Best Director, and Best Adapted
Screenplay for the second “Godfa-
ther,” he was also a nominee for

producing and writing “The Con-

versation.” But it is too often disre-

garded in favor of the blockbusters

that bookended it.

In fact, “The Conversation”—

which is being shown in a new

35mm print from March 20 to April

2 at Film Forum in New York ahead

of nationwide bookings—has as

much to offer 21st century viewers

as many of Mr. Coppola’s more pop-

ular efforts. Although firmly rooted

in the analog world, the film tackles

head-on the ethics of eavesdrop-

ping—a topic of continuing rele-

vance in a society ever more wor-

ried about the privacy implications

of relying on electronic devices and

digital communication.

According to Walter Murch, the

film’s supervising editor and de-

signer of its “sound montage,” Mr.

Coppola developed the kernel of the

idea for the film after learning, in a

Life magazine story, about San

Francisco detective Hal Lipset,

whose repertoire included audio

surveillance. The rest of the inspi-

ration came courtesy of Michelan-

gelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” (1966),

which revolves around a photogra-

pher who persuades himself that

his snapshots include evidence of a

crime; Mr. Coppola presented a

sonic spin on a similar story.

As the film opens, Caul has been

retained by a business executive to

surveil Mark and Ann (Frederic For-

rest and Cindy Williams), a couple

who look to be in the throes of an

by the notion that he might thwart

a murder; he has come to believe

that his work on a previous job

played a part in the deaths of three

individuals. “I’m not afraid of

death,” Caul says in an evocative

dream sequence. “I am afraid of

murder.”

Caul’s conviction that the record-

ing is intended to be used as justifi-

cation to murder the couple may

BYPETERTONGUETTE

BYTOBIASGREY

Lending an Ear to

Surveillance

office romance. Caul

deploys sensitive

microphones to doc-

ument their conver-

sation in Union

Square. “I don’t care

what they’re talking

about,” Caul tells a

coworker. “All I

want is a nice, fat

recording.”

Yet Caul proves

to be a mercenary

with scruples. After

stopping, starting

and smoothing out

the recording of the

couple—Mr. Murch’s

hypnotic sound

world includes the

squeal of audio

tapes and the snap

of electronic but-

tons being pressed

and released—Caul

deciphers an at-first

garbled comment by

Mr. Forrest’s charac-

ter that, when heard

clearly, stops him:

“He’d kill us if he

got the chance.”

Taking the remark

literally—that the man believes

their lives are in jeopardy—Caul de-

clines to collect the $15,000 due for

his work and attempts to hang onto

his tapes.

Mr. Coppola makes clear that

Caul’s concern is rooted in religious

faith more than any particular pen-

chant for conspiracy theories: As

played by an unusually shy, un-

forthcoming Hackman—even the

actor’s expressive eyes are masked

by the thick frames of his eye-

glasses—Caul is a devout, confes-

sion-going Catholic much exercised

strike some viewers as

an unlikely leap, but it

is bolstered by Mr.

Coppola’s imaginative

filmmaking. Caul’s cli-

ent resorts to subter-

fuge to eventually gain

access to the tapes

made in Union Square,

and as Mr. Coppola

sees it, a wiretapper

seems to emerge from

behind every door: A

colleague even boasts

of having tipped the

scales of a presidential

contest by tape-record-

ing the calls of a major-

party nominee. Indulg-

ing in increasingly wild

imagery—including a

hotel-room toilet out of

which blood spills—Mr.

Coppola anticipates the

much-noted surrealistic

visuals of “Apocalypse

Now.”

Yet Mr. Coppola

makes his best point by

proving that Caul’s as-

sumptions were off-tar-

get. As it turns out, the

recording does allude

to murder, but the characters

played by Mr. Forrest and Ms. Wil-

liams are not the would-be victims

Caul imagines them to be. In show-

ing the folly in Caul’s attempt to

draw conclusions from limited in-

formation, “The Conversation” of-

fers a timely rebuke of a surveil-

lance subculture that today has

become close to omnipresent.

Mr. Tonguette is the author of “Pic-

turing Peter Bogdanovich,” to be

published in July by the University

Press of Kentucky. PARAMOUNT/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Gene Hackman as San Francisco

surveillance expert Harry Caul.

MASTERPIECE|‘THE CONVERSATION’ (1974), BY FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

ICONS

A Painter

Between

Countries

James Tissot was a star in the art worlds

of late 19th-century London and Paris.

the women’s chairs, and said he

couldn’t imagine living with a paint-

ing where he had to look at some-

thing as rucked up and wrinkled ev-

ery day.”

Convalescent women became a

leitmotif of Tissot’s work as he in-

creasingly trained his attention on

Newton, who had contracted tuber-

culosis and was often chair-bound.

When she died in 1882, a distraught

Tissot moved back to France, where

he began consulting spiritualists in a

desperate attempt to converse with

her from beyond the grave. One of

the highlights of the exhibition is

“The Mediumistic Apparition’’

(1885), which Tissot kept in a special

room he used for seances; it shows

notebooks full of drawings and de-

scriptions. One of these, “Album of

Sketches for the Life of Our Lord Je-

sus Christ” (1880), has been lent by

the Brooklyn Museum for the exhibi-

tion. In the same year, he produced a

series of paintings updating the par-

able of the Prodigal Son in a mod-

ern-day setting. “They are self-por-

traits,” Mr. Sciama says. “Tissot saw

himself as an exile and a traveler

who had returned.”

two mysterious

figures swathed

in white, glow-

ing with an un-

earthly inner

light. Long be-

lieved to have

been destroyed by the painter him-

self, it was found a year and half ago

by the current owners of the chateau

he lived in.

It was one of Tissot’s last oil

paintings. In the 15 years before his

death in 1902, he became increas-

ingly religious and devoted himself

to making hundreds of gouache illus-

trations of the Bible. As part of his

research, he traveled to the Middle

East three times, returning with CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: TATE, LONDON, DIST. RMN-GRAND PALAIS/TATE PHOTOGRAPHY; ÉRIC MARIN; MUSÉE D’ORSAY

position, and Tissot

chose the word “Cal-

cutta” because in

French it sounds like

the slang phrase

Quel cul t’as(“What

a behind you have”).

Thereisashiftin

the tenor of Tissot’s

work around 1876, when he fell in

love with Kathleen Newton, an Irish

divorcee who became his frequent

model. In “October” (1877), a joyful

Newton is shown hiking up her skirts

as she ducks under an overhang of

golden leaves. There is an enigmatic

smile on her face as she looks over

her shoulder, leaving the viewer to

wonder if she is simply glancing

back or running away as part of a

game.

Tissot often used posed photo-

graphs of Newton to create such

elaborate visual narratives, which

confounded some critics. “Tissot de-

cides to adopt a style of narrative

painting that is typically English, but

unlike English painters who leave the

viewer in no doubt as to what the

meaning and morality of their narra-

tive is, Tissot’s work is often much

harder to grasp,” said Ms. Kisiel. “I

think in that sense he remains very

French.”

Ms. Kisiel points to “The Conva-

lescent” (ca. 1876), which shows a

young woman stretched out on a

chair. She seems to be ill, but there

is a slight smile on her face. Behind

her is an old woman who observes

her with a lorgnette. Is she the

young woman’s chaperone? Why are

a man’s cane and hat on the chair

behind her? Has the young woman

gone astray in some way?

These unresolved ambiguities

meant that “a number of Victorian

critics found this painting particu-

larly annoying,” Ms. Kisiel says. “One

of them became so irritated that he

complained about the carpet beneath

Clockwise from top: ‘The Gallery of the H.M.S.

Calcutta’ (ca. 1877); ‘The Mediumistic Apparition’

(1885); James Tissot ca. 1900.

REVIEW