6. Keep an eye on the bigger picture

No, the catchphrase is not mine: it is part of the script of Exit through the Gift Shop, one of those contemporary crazes on graffiti and the secrecy of the underground; but it serves my purpose this time, for the series of paradoxes is far from being over.

My eye has been caught in the intricate maze of a classic. And, while giving me food for thought, it set the scene for some detective work - on your behalf.

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Fill in the following gaps with one word from the table below. There are five words you do not need to use.

[Note: Any comment on the film, or on the message of this synopsis are welcome, but publishing a version of your gap-filling activity is counter-productive. The full text will be published in just a few days' time].

  The Conversation

                                          Fill in the following gaps with one word from the table below. There are five words you do not need to use.

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Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a paranoid surveillance expert running his 1. ___________ company. Caul is obsessed with his own privacy; his apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door, he uses pay phones to make calls and claims to have 2. _________ home telephone, and his office is enclosed in wire mesh in a corner of a much larger warehouse. Caul is utterly professional at 3. _________, but he finds personal contact difficult. He is exquisitely uncomfortable in dense crowds and withdrawn and taciturn in 4. _________ intimate situations; he is also reticent and secretive with work colleagues. He is nondescript in appearance, 5. ________ for his habit of wearing a translucent plastic raincoat virtually everywhere he goes, even when it is not raining. 6. _________ his insistence that his professional code means that he is not 7. _________ for worrying about the actual content of the conversations he records or the uses to which his clients put his surveillance activities, he is in 8. _________ wracked by guilt over a past wiretap job that left three persons dead; his sense of guilt is sharpened by his devout Catholicism. His one hobby is playing along with his favourite jazz records on a tenor saxophone in the 9. _________ of his apartment.

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Caul has taken on the task of 10. _________ a couple's conversation as they walk through crowded Union Square in San Francisco. This challenging task is accomplished, but Caul feels increasingly agonized over his 11. _________ about the actual meaning of the conversation and about what may happen to the couple once the client hears the tape. He plays the tape again and again 12. _________ the movie, refining its accuracy (by catching one key — though crucially ambiguous — phrase 13. _________ under the sound of a street musician: "He'd kill us if he got the chance") and constantly reinterpreting its meaning in the light of 14. _________ he knows and what he guesses. Caul avoids handing in the tape to the aide of the man who commissioned the surveillance; he then finds himself 15. _________ increasing pressure from the aide and is himself followed, tricked, and listened in on, the tape eventually 16. _________ from him in a moment when his guard is down. Caul's appalled efforts to forestall tragedy ultimately fail — because, it turns 17. _________, the conversation doesn't mean what he thought it 18. _________, and the tragedy he anticipated isn't the one that eventually happens. In the final scene of the film, Caul discovers that his own apartment is 19. _________ and gradually takes it to pieces in an unsuccessful effort to discover the bug, eventually destroying everything there (even, 20. _________ a moment of hesitation, his plastic figurine of the Madonna) except for his beloved tenor saxophone: at the film's end he's left sitting amidst the wreck, blowing a solo.

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AFTER            DOUBTS        HIDDEN                 OWN                         STOLEN
APART            EVEN             MONITORING       PERSONAL             THROUGH
BUGGED        EXCEPT        MORE                       PRIVACY                 UNDER
DESPITE        FACT              NO                             RESPONSIBLE      WHAT
DID                  FEARS           OUT                          ROBBED                  WORK

Whether it's worth commenting upon, well, it's for you to decide.

Key to test THE CONVERSATION