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.
Phillips, Gene D. Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1995.
Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’s are two magnum opuses to quest the evil and virtuous human nature. They have some similar and different places among the story plots, characterizations, and environments. At the same time, they reflect the exploration of the human nature in a different era and the exploration is not the end.
...eatrical production can be clearly recognized by the viewer. It is the stylistic elements that each of the creators implement in their respective creations that allows for the interpretation of the audience on their views of imperialism. Author, Joseph Conrad portrays his philosophy of the savagery of imperialism through the eyes of the main character in the novella, Marlow, as he witnesses the barbaric acts of the natives and their effect on Kurtz and his gradual realization of his sinful deeds and their consequences. Comparatively, director Francis Ford Coppola chose to display the brutality of the expansionism and the effect that it has on humans and the abrupt ending that is to follow. Neither Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nor Coppola’s Apocalypse Now failed to represent the devastatingly harmful eventual result of imperialism from an imperialist’s perspective.
Comparing Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now Heart of Darkness, written by Joseph Conrad, and "Apocalypse Now," a movie directed by Francis Coppola, are two works that parallel one another but at the same time reflect their own era in time and their creator's own personal feelings and prejudices. "Apocalypse Now" was released in 1979 after two years in the making, as Coppola's modern interpretation to Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness (Harris). Conrad's book is an excellent example of the advances writers and philosophers made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This advance deals with civilized humanity's ability to be prepared for and know the unknown. (Johnson) Comparatively, Copolla's movie did the same in the late 1970's.
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.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of darkness and other tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
"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]
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.
Both Conrad’s, “Heart of Darkness”, and Coppola’s, “Apocalypse Now”, profoundly illustrate the journey of man into their inner self and man’s encounters with their insanity, fears and demise. The novella and film are comprised of numerous pivotal themes that facilitate the understanding of the deeper meaning of both works. Fundamentally, theme is an extensive message or idea expressed by an author and is a crucial element of literature since it sheds light on universal concepts. The most striking parallels that can be formulated when comparing themes in both the novella and the film are associated with human nature. Specifically, Conrad and Coppola incorporate theme of hypocrisy in order to portray man’s incredible potential for evil.
Hay, Eloise Knapp. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: a Critical Study. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1972. 120. Print.
Heart of Darkness, is not only an intense tale of pursuit, but also a psychological roller coaster as, through the characters of the story, Joseph Conrad shows us a powerful struggle between the Freudian personalities of id, ego and superego. The main characters of the novel, Marlow and Kurtz are mainly identified with the id and the super-ego type of personalities, and throughout the novel, these characters are placed in intense situations which makes them question their own beliefs and reactions, and ultimately their human personality. Hence, in between the characters, not only is there a battle in the physical sense, but also on the meta-physical level. This leads to a psychological imbalance between the human personalities of both the characters, and while one character is already dominated by his id to a large extent, the other character grapples with the struggle of his id with his super-ego.
When writers write, it is often to convey a deeper meaning or truth to it readers. With this in mind, we should first take the book at face value then analysis the story to see the point that the writer revels. In The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad does this very well. The story goes from what we originally thought as just a story of a journey into Africa to a story of indeed a journey to the hearts of men. Conrad’s truth in The Heart of Darkness is multi-layered in dealing with imperialism and colonialism, but leads us to a critique of humanity as a whole. The biggest issue that Conrad shows in this book, is his philosophy of the dark nature of man. This paper will explore the evidence for the nature of man theory and then look at the proposed solution subtlety given by Conrad.
Since its publication in 1899, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has rarely been disputed on the basis of its literary merits; in fact, it was long seen as one of the great novels of the burgeoning modern era, a sort of bridge between the values and storytelling styles of the waning Victorian period and those of the modern era (Gatten), and regarded a high-ranking space amidst the great literature of the century, if not the millennia (Mitchell 20). Conrad’s literary masterpiece manages references to other great literature, universal themes which cut to the heart of philosophical questions of the innate goodness or evil of man, and historical references such as the Belgium and Roman empires (Kuchta 160), among other accomplishments, and so has garnered a lexicon all its own in the annals of literary criticism, debate, and analysis.