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The Vietnam war in apocalypse now
The Vietnam war in apocalypse now
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The purpose behind Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is to express the “hellishness and surreality of the Vietnam War” and its psychedelic effects on the sanity of the soldiers who fought. To further stress this theme of lunacy the director uses film elements in cinematography, sound and mis-en-scene. The director uses elements of expressionism by using low key lighting to help the demented character of Colonel Kurtz look more extreme in contrast to the other characters. He also uses the mixing of sounds to resemble the chaos in the midst of war, and uses costume and makeup to distort the character’s images and further accentuate his point of the madness brought up by war. Overall, the director incorporates these elements to help create …show more content…
The use of this element is found near the end of the film when Willard first meets Kurtz. The shadows are so severe the audience can’t configure Kurtz’s face; the only things that are illuminated are his bald head and hands. Kurtz is the epitome of madness; his ruthlessness becomes indisputable once Willard reaches the outrageous chaos in Cambodia. Kurtz represents the worst case scenario of a soldier whose sanity has been corrupted by war. Kurtz explains that he wasn’t always evil, after inoculating the masses for polio and seeing all his work come undone by the genius who thought to cut off all their arms, he became inspired by the outrageous idea. The expressionistic lighting successfully reinforces his madness because although the film uses low key lighting on other characters, the lighting is so extreme when Kurtz is introduced; it makes it clear that his character is more extreme than all the other characters. Thus, His insanity is more extreme than other …show more content…
When Willard is first introduced, his psychosis is prevalent as he mourns in his disheveled plain room, basically naked. His nakedness and the messiness of his room resemble his state of mind. The cause of his temporary madness: his abstinence from war. Likewise, Kurtz madness is illustrated by the havoc in his setting: Cambodia. The American photographer journalist explains to Willard that Cambodia is a reflection of Kurtz because he rules there and they are all his kids. This further proves Kurt’z madness, because the reflection of him is a manic society. Also, Willard’s companion Lance Johnson shows his developing madness through the use of makeup as the war progresses. In the beginning of the film he is clean. By the end of the film his face is covered in green war paint and he sticks the sticks thrown at them by the Cambodian people into his hair like antlers. This shows how the madness of the war has transformed him not only mentally, but
...e black comedy, Dr. Strangelove, incorporates Kubrick’s political beliefs through the film’s distinctive style, utilization of motifs, and the suggested affiliations between war and sex. Stanley Kubrick emotionally distances the viewer from this terrifying issue by illustrating the absurdity of the war. By implying sexual frustration and suppression as a reason for war tension, Kubrick displays a worst-case scenario of the Cold War in comical fashion. Dr. Strangelove is an anti-war satire that implicitly conveys the importance of sexual expression while humorously portraying the worthlessness of war and violence that ravaged the sanity of the 1960s American public.
Prideaux, T. "Take Aim, Fire at the Agonies of War." Life 20 Dec. 1963: 115-118. Rabe, David. "Admiring the Unpredictable Mr. Kubrick." New York Times 21 June 1987: H34+
To depict a surreal world of the horrors of war and craft a gripping suspense of the sequence in review, the film director employs a wide variety of audio track devices such as diegetic sound effects, non-diegetic music, voice over, and editing tools to affect the audience’s feelings. In the essay below I would like to dwell on specific audio and editing techniques employed by Coppola in “Apocalypsis Now” sequence to create suspense.
Not the End 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. At the beginning, the two works have plentiful the same “story” (Dorall 303). Heart of Darkness tells a story about Marlow, a young captain.
...d. In the film, Willard remarks that Kurtz is “clear in the mind but mad in the soul” (Coppola). The statement that Kurtz is a “broken man” is continually reinforced. He was first broken from society and later broken from himself. Eventually, Willard kills Kurtz and Kurtz dies as an honorable soldier. However, this does not occur in the novella in which Kurtz naturally dies from malaria.
Captain Willard is constantly trying to survive throughout this mission. He has to float in a boat through Cambodia during the Vietnam War. He runs into some natives along the way and has some encounters with them. For example, the captain of the boat is killed by a spear, which is thrown, by a native. When he reaches the land that Kurtz has taken over, he strives very hard to survive. The fist images that you see are hanging dead bodies over the water, dead bodies along the shoreline. It is an island filled with mass murderers and cold-blooded natives. The natives there are so very much under Kurtz’s power that they are willing to kill Willard in a heartbeat.
Vees-Gulani, Susanne. "Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five." CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44.2 (2003): 175+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. Vees-Gulani uses medical journals and works by other doctors to diagnose Billy Pilgrim with PTSD. While she isn’t a doctor, she provides an adequate amount of evidence that supports her idea. This essay ties in directly to my topic and I plan to use it as another way to link Slaughterhouse-five to PTSD.
In both the film and the movie, Kurtz is portrayed as a man of great stature and mastery whose actions become questioned due his barbaric conduct. While Marlow slowly learns more and more regarding who Kurtz is and what he has done through others’ conversations, Willard educates himself about Kurtz through pictures and files he has of Kurtz. He states that he feels like he already knows a thing or two about Kurtz that are not in the papers he has, and that beyond the bridge, there is only Kurtz. This goes to show how Kurtz develops a prof...
Kurtz does not have to adapt to his environment, instead the environment adapted onto him, creating an evil and darker twin. He allows his self-serving greed to control him leading him to his dissolution. It is his imperialistic actions that allowed him to fixate over materialistic things. His obsession with wealth and power leads him to destroy the system he was preaching to the natives. His corruption is made evident as he uses the power he gains to create disorder, leading him to the darkness causing his dissolution.
When reading each page, a sort of investigation begins in trying to figure out how Kurtz became insane. However, that investigation was not fully closed because in the end no one knew what had happened to him. In a way his character presented the idea that perhaps the darkness, his darkness was his own and was all along in him waiting to come out. Because there were other men living and working in the Congo who had not become insane as he did, such as the Russian trader or the ivory company’s accountant.
...adaptation of Ron Kovic’s best-selling autobiography. Both of these movies depict real-life accounts of how war can change people both physically and emotionally. America is approaching the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War. Today’s students are much too young to remember this time in society. While textbooks have plenty of information regarding this time period, they do not have the emotional impact that these movies convey. In a case of life imitating art, Stone’s movies are the voice of a generation.
“Under an overcast sky — seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” This is the last line of the book Heart of Darkness and it summed up the setting and tone of the book. Apocalypse Now is an epic war film made in 1979 set in Vietnam directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It is based on the book Heart of Darkness. The settings of both the book and the movie are very different; they take place in completely different places. However, their effects are very similar to each other and shown in a variety of ways: in character development, cultural aspects, as well as thematically.
Jarvis, Christina. “The Vietnamization of World War II in Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity’s Rainbow.” www.wlajournal.com. War, Literature, and the Arts. 95-117. Web. 15 Nov. 2013.
Apocalypse Now is a film about madness. In this film, Willard, played by Charlie Sheen, is sent through madness, reminiscent of Dantes' journey through hell. His mission is to kill Kurtz, who’s gone insane according to military intelligence. Kurtz has gone on his own, starting his own society in Cambodia, where his troops and the local tribes worship him as a god. Kurtz has committed murder by waging his own ferocious, independent war against Vietnamese intelligence agents with his own native Montagnard army across the border in an ancient Cambodian temple deep in the jungle. General Corman explains the confused insanity of the war: "In this war, things get confused out there, power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity." The colonel has become a self-appointed, worshipped godlike leader/dictator of a renegade native tribe. General Corman describes Kurtz's temptation to be deified: "Because there's a conflict in every human heart between the rational and the irrational, between the good and the evil. The good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Therein, man has got a breaking point. You and I have. Walter Kurtz has reached his. And very obviously, he has gone insane." Kurtz’s motivation behind his actions is his need to feel godlike, to act without judgment.
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.