The concept of pastiche has encountered much attention from the exponents of post modernism. As the concern with reproduction of earlier texts is central to adaptation, it is appropriate to consider adapted films as pastiche where diverse texts merge together. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now can be considered as pastiche because of its intertextual meanings which are mostly drawn from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
In this essay I will discuss the statement “What a film takes from a book matters; but so does what it brings to a book.” by analysing Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad in relation to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
The film has its debut with Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), which in the beginning of the film is presented as relaxing in his hotel room in Saigon. But the first images which are presented describe the waking nightmares of the captain followed by a panoramic shot of the jungle which is crossed again and again by helicopters which are shown in extreme closeup. The hallucinatory nature of the images shown in the beginning attempt to make a short but comprehensive description of the war in Vietnam. It is not clear if the perspective comes from inside his head or from inside his room looking into his head. To the amazement of the viewer, the voice from Willard's mind seems to be numbed and skeptical similar to that of a detective. The narrator from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was named Harlow but Francis Ford Coppola changed the name of his narrator to Philip Marlowe, which is private detective.
In the film and the novel, the point of view of the narrator is very important to the reader's respectively to the viewer's perception of him. Joseph Conrad builds his novel as a story which is t...
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...litary task which implies terminating Kurtz. Looking into the personal record of Kurtz, he attempts to find more details about his next victim. From Conrad’s point of view, he believes that the truth behind the heart of darkness can never be found, giving Kurtz as an example.But Francis Ford Coppola takes a different approach and describes Willard as a man which became obsessed with knowing the truth about his victim. He believes that in order to kill Kurtz he must first understand the type of man he was, but as soon as he uncovers the mystery behind the heart of darkness, he finds himself unable to resist its power. Willard begins to sense the connection to the wilderness of the jungle and its inhabitants, the way Marlow did. A military assassin uses a reasonable and civilised form of killing, but as he went further into the jungle those boundaries started to fade.
The political and social unrest of the 1970s provided Hollywood with some of its most influential films, often stemming from unlikely sources; two decades after melodrama's heyday, the genre re-emerged in an original form that continues to affect modern filmmaking. The historical influences of Italian opera and Hollywood family melodramas spawned a type of film that has been described as "historical, operatic, choral or epic" (Greene 388). Filmmakers of the 1970s explored the traditional modes of melodramatic expression in order to address the socially charged times they lived in. Filmed in the wake of the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is a complex treatise of human morality and modern warfare that expresses itself through melodramatic conventions. Coppola contained his war movie to the personal level, in order to make larger criticisms of the Vietnam conflict. The central narrative, based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, follows an Oedipal trajectory similar to those found in many 1950's family melodramas. The surreal, and often ironic use of music provides a startling counterpoint to the actions on screen. The film is imbued with many of the representative motifs, such as sexual dysfunction and alcoholism, which are found in earlier melodramas. Apocalypse Now helped to establish a new film genre - the operatic melodrama - that combined the historical representations of classic melodramas with the raw spectacle of modern filmmaking.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now portrays the brutality of the Vietnam War and American’s perspective from therein. Coppola successfully produced this film parallel to Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness. Both portray the effects of imperialism on a native land with respect to the imperialists’ viewpoint. The scene of Apocalypse Now that mirrored Heart of Darkness with the most creative license, on the behalf of Coppola, is perhaps the final scene as Kurtz is slaughtered. Each creator successfully utilized the arts of their crafts to create a final production worthy of admiration while clearly stating their interpretation of imperialism.
The movie “Apocalypse Now”, directed by Francis Coppola, is based on Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness. The movie has to do with survival, obsession, and finding ones self. The inclination of this paper is to let the reader get a better understanding of how Captain Willard (the main character) goes through survival, obsession, and courage while trying to hunt down Kurtz.
Film and literature are two media forms that are so closely related, that we often forget there is a distinction between them. We often just view the movie as an extension of the book because most movies are based on novels or short stories. Because we are accustomed to this sequence of production, first the novel, then the motion picture, we often find ourselves making value judgments about a movie, based upon our feelings on the novel. It is this overlapping of the creative processes that prevents us from seeing movies as distinct and separate art forms from the novels they are based on.
Heart of Darkness is Joseph Conrad's tale of one man's journey, both mental and physical, into the depths of the wild African jungle and the human soul. The seaman, Marlow, tells his crew a startling tale of a man named Kurtz and his expedition that culminates in his encounter with the "voice" of Kurtz and ultimately, Kurtz's demise. The passage from Part I of the novel consists of Marlow's initial encounter with the natives of this place of immense darkness, directly relating to Conrad's use of imagery and metaphor to illustrate to the reader the contrast between light and dark. The passage, although occurring earlier on in the novel, is interspersed with Marlow's two opposing points of view: one of naïveté, which comes before Marlow's eventual epiphany after having met Kurtz, and the matured perspective he takes on after all of the events leading up to his and Kurtz's encounter.
In Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Heart of Darkness,” the narrator, Marlow language, and point of view to convey the conflicting emotions he has about Kurtz due to the image he fabricated Kurtz to be, and the reality of Kurtz. Marlow’s language throughout the piece reveals to the reader how he feels about Kurtz and how he perceives Kurtz’s actions. Marlow’s point of view also allows him to support both of his perceptions of Kurtz because he doesn’t see only bad or only good in
In the opening scenes of the documentary film "Hearts of Darkness-A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," Eleanor Coppola describes her husband Francis's film, "Apocalypse Now," as being "loosely based" on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Indeed, "loosely" is the word; the period, setting, and circumstances of the film are totally different from those of the novella. The question, therefore, is whether any of Conrad's classic story of savagery and madness is extant in its cinematic reworking. It is this question that I shall attempt to address in this brief monograph by looking more closely at various aspects of character, plot, and theme in each respective work.
Without personal access to authors, readers are left to themselves to interpret literature. This can become challenging with more difficult texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Fortunately, literary audiences are not abandoned to flounder in pieces such as this; active readers may look through many different lenses to see possible meanings in a work. For example, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be deciphered with a post-colonial, feminist, or archetypal mindset, or analyzed with Freudian psycho-analytic theory. The latter two would effectively reveal the greater roles of Kurtz and Marlow as the id and the ego, respectively, and offer the opportunity to draw a conclusion about the work as a whole.
Hay, Eloise Knapp. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: a Critical Study. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1972. 120. Print.
Phillips, Gene D. Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1995.
"Heart of Darkness , which follows closely the actual events of Conrad's Congo journey, tells of the narrator's fascination by a mysterious white man, Kurtz, who, by his eloquence and hypnotic personality, dominates the brutal tribesmen around him. Full of contempt for the greedy traders who exploit the natives, the narrator cannot deny the power of this figure of evil who calls forth from him something approaching reluctant loyalty."[1]
From the very beginning of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad traps us in a complex play of language, where eloquence is little more than a tool to obscure horrific moral shortcomings. Hazy, absurd descriptions, frame narratives, and a surreal sense of Saussurean structural linguistics create distance from an ever-elusive center, to show that language is incapable of adequately or directly revealing truth. Understanding instead occurs in the margins and along the edges of the narrative; the meaning of a story “is not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze” (105).
Throughout its entirety, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness utilizes many contrasts and paradoxes in an attempt to teach readers about the complexities of both human nature and the world. Some are more easily distinguishable, such as the comparison between civilized and uncivilized people, and some are more difficult to identify, like the usage of vagueness and clarity to contrast each other. One of the most prominent inversions contradicts the typical views of light and dark. While typically light is imagined to expose the truth and darkness to conceal it, Conrad creates a paradox in which darkness displays the truth and light blinds us from it.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a great example of a Modernist novel because of its general obscurity. The language is thick and opaque. The novel is littered with words such as: inconceivable, inscrutable, gloom. Rather than defining characters in black and white terms, like good and bad, they entire novel is in different shades of gray. The unfolding of events takes the reader between many a foggy bank; the action in the book and not just the language echoes tones of gray.
* Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M.H. Abrams, general editor. (London: W.W. Norton, 1962, 2000)