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film1979

Apocalypse Now

Disciplines:
film/war film
optics/epic
cinema/art cinema

Summary

A 1979 film by Francis Ford Coppola loosely adapting Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' into the Vietnam War, following a special-ops officer sent to kill a rogue colonel who has built a cult in the Cambodian jungle.

Core Contribution

One of the defining American art films, 'Apocalypse Now' demonstrated that the Hollywood epic could accommodate philosophical poetry (Eliot's 'The Hollow Men') and profound ambiguity about the moral corruption inherent in military institutions.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • Marlon Brando reciting Eliot (the use of 'The Hollow Men' to characterize Kurtz fuses high modernism with genre cinema — making the war film suddenly capable of philosophical tragedy)
  • Production-as-metaphor (the legendary chaos of filming in the Philippines — near-death, madness, and excess — was almost identical to the film's subject matter, making the making the movie)

Historical Influences

Joseph Conrad T. S. Eliot Federico Fellini

Intellectual Lineage

New Hollywood Vietnam War filmConrad literary adaptation

Allied Works

Heart of Darkness Full Metal Jacket Platoon

Contemporaries & Peers

The Deer Hunter Platoon Full Metal Jacket

Minds Influenced

Full Metal Jacket Dunkirk

Intellectual Posterity

Redux culture

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Apocalypse Now

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