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Home , Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz, New Hollywood, The Godfather

A Level Studies - Focus Film Factsheet (1979 , Coppola, USA)

consuming beautiful nature reflects how his Component 1: Varieties of mind is trapped in the horrific jungle war taking Film and Film-Making (AL) place across and the neighbouring Component 1: American Film (AS) countries of Laos and . To the left the impassive all-seeing eyes of a Buddhist Core Study Areas: statue, contrasts his personal chaos with the Key Elements of Film Form inner peace of Eastern philosophy. The music accompanying this hypnotic dream-like Meaning & Response sequence is the epic song by , ‘The The Contexts of Film End’. The lyric accompanying this particular set of images is ‘in our desperate land’: referring Specialist Study Area: perhaps to both America and Vietnam (AL ) • 03.01.16 - Kurtz’s dying words: ‘The horror…the horror…’. A quote from Marlow, the character Rationale for study & narrative whom Kurtz is based on, from ’s • is renowned as a leading novella, . The words refer to figure of New and an auteur; along the dark centre of human nature that is unleashed with trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990), in barbarous conditions like those found in Apocalypse Now represents his greatest work. an isolated jungle or a chaotic war zone. It is also significant as one of the greatest anti- war movies and one of the first to critique CORE STUDY AREAS 1 - STARTING the . A film renowned for its POINTS - Key Elements of Film production excesses, it remains evidence of a Form (Micro Features) phenomenon which nearly destroyed its producers and some of its principal cast and crew. Cinematography • The mainly linear narrative takes place at the • 02:35:25 - Willard finally meets Kurtz in his peak of the Vietnam War (1969) and concerns jungle hideout. This is the first close- of Kurtz a battle hardened USA special forces soldier, other than archive photographs seen earlier Captain Willard (), who is in the film. Whilst talking to Willard, Kurtz secretly sent upriver, into the depths of the emerges out of the darkness like a monster jungles bordering Vietnam, to assassinate a or a dead person – lit with ghoulish yellow, charismatic, rogue American Colonel, Kurtz LK light the effect is disturbing. Centrally () who is waging his own private framed Kurtz seems imposing and dismissive war and embarrassing the USA Government. of Willard; a powerful man but one who is both spiritually and physically diseased. Mise-en-Scène STARTING POINTS - Useful Sequences • 00.35-01.13 - The first line ofThe Doors’ - beginning and ending song The End has the mournfully sung • 02.18 - A composite image of the film’s anti- lyric, ‘This is the End’. The lyric echoes hero protagonist, Captain Willard. He is the onscreen destruction of a beautiful and significantly in an intense BCU and upside untouched Eden by the devilish nightmare down – his world is literally and metaphorically of (an explosive petroleum jelly). inverted. The central image of a hellish fire 1 A Level Film Studies - Focus Film Factsheet

• 47.19 - Robert Duval as Lieutenant Colonel at a busy street scene below: (04:10-05: 47) Kilgore, a tough, brutal, and charismatic officer ‘Saigon. Shit! I’m still only in Saigon. Every in charge of an Air Cavalary regiment consisting time I think I am going to wake up back in the largely of Helicopter gunships. The regiment jungle….when I was home after my first tour it is summoned to attack a Vitnamese village by was worst … I’d wake up and there’d be nothing bugle call and Kilgore sports a Union officers … I hardly said a word to my wife until I said stetson – the connection to the genocidal ‘yes’ to a divorce. When I was here I wanted be destruction of the indigenous Native Americans there. When I was there all I could think of was is made. Kilgore is a surf loving maverick, so getting back into the jungle. I’m here a week convinced of his indestructibility that he strips now. Waiting for a mission… Each time I looked to the waist as the counter-attack rages around around, the walls moved in a little tighter.” His him. After calling in a napalm attack on the delivery is dead pan, resigned and depressed. jungle treeline he utters those eery, iconic lines: He is a man who has fought so much he has ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning. … It forgotten why he is fighting; all he knows is that smells like . Some day this war is going to he fights. As a representation of a dehumanised end.’ It’s interesting to think who Kilgore would soldier the performance is electrifying. His have blamed for the eventual fall of Saigon in last voice-over monologue (02:57:48) suggests 1975 and the ignominous retreat in defeat by the that despite having killed Kurtz, Willard will USA on Helicopters. In Vietnam the cavalry did remain as conflicted and alienated as ever: They‘ not turn up at the last moment to save the day. were going to make me a Major for this and I wasn’t even in their fucking army anymore’. Editing • 37:13-37:14 - The dramatic cut from a noisy and bombastic air cavalry attack, accompanied CORE STUDY AREAS 2 - STARTING by diegetic Wagnerian music (see below) is POINTS – Meaning & Response contrasted in a shocking manner with the peaceful scenes of village life (consisting Representations largely of women and singing schoolchildren). Gender • 00:10 - 07:16 - See the opening sequence with • Gender is clearly treated in the film through its brilliant use of composite cross-dissolves a lack of female representation (see below.) to communicate Willard’s broken state of The war is presented to us as a mind. The sequence is also very useful to man’s war. However there are many unnamed explore in terms of all micro features – Vietnamese women portrayed – some especially mise-en-scène and performance. playing brave gun toting fighters as well Sound as the more conventional victims of war. Their purposeful and serious identities • The helicopter attack to Wagner’s stirring, The contrasts with the idealised and sexually (see above): the music objectified Western Play Girl centrefolds. starts as diegetic but becomes non-diegetic. The choice of music by the anti-Semite Wagner Age plays on the idea of a racist agenda at work as • Age is treated largely through the naivety of well as adding to the realism of the scene. Mr Clean and Lance, two teenage grunts into • Only seconds after listening to a tape recorded dancing, , drugs and surfing. The letter from his Mum, Mr Clean (Washburne), tragedy of the junk boat massacre, where the a young boy of 17, (19 was the average Americans slaughter a Vietnamese family, is age of Vietnam conscripts), lies dead. The intensified by the fact that they’re scared trigger terrible diegetic, contrapuntal sound design happy kids spooked by a young girl’s attempt to as the crew cradle Clean’s corpse and the rescue her puppy – the young slaughtering the tape keeps playing is heart-breaking. young. Otherwise the young Vietnamese we see • Willard provides voice over narration are conventionally presented as helpless victims. throughout the film. His first words – stream Ethnicity of consciousness – occur as he wakes from the • The film sets up from the very beginning the nightmares that introduce the film and peers binary opposites of East v West. The film through his room’s blinds (a trope of entrapment) 2 A Level Film Studies - Focus Film Factsheet

however is presented to us from only the West’s director is yelling at Willard not to stop and perspective. Even when Willard finally makes it not to look at the camera – just like a movie to Kurtz’s jungle hideout we learn about the man director! This is a self-reflexive critique of the from ’s drug addled American media’s parasitic approach to war – seeing it photojournalist and not from the mouth of one as a slick spectacle to entertain the masses of his indigenous soldiers. The Vietnamese are rather than a grim and confused reality. largely silent throughout this film (see below). Aesthetics (i.e. the ‘look and feel’ Women of the film including visual style, • 3 real 1973/4 Playboy Playmates, entertain influences, auteur, motifs) the troops deep in the jungle on a surreal set • War is beautiful - Cinematographer Vittorio overseen by phallic replicas of missiles. The Storaro shot the principal photography of girls are dressed as a cowgirl, a native American the film for which he won an Oscar in 1980. squaw and a Union cavalry officer and Many critics and fans have remarked on the sexually with guns. These representations beautiful cinematography – yes, it maybe are referencing a mythic and violent part of glorifies something that is hideous, but equally American history where an indigenous race was it transforms the real into the surreal which was effectively exterminated by a technically superior clearly something Coppola wanted to achieve. white force – an obvious parallel with the • War is surreal - See the scenes involving the fighting in Vietnam. Equally the sexualisation Playboy girls and then the Media. The scene of the women is a critique of the obscene values involving the fighting (dealt with below) at the imported from the West into the East – one Do Lung Bridge; the ‘Charlie ’t surf’ scene where the phallic power of the gun is fetishized. and the helicopter attack and its use of Wagner’s Local Vietnamese villagers look on bemused music are equally strange. Throughout the film through the fencing around the site. The show river mists and smoke from flares and fires seem descends into farce and riot as the soldiers try to to be permanently presenting disorientating mob the girls who fly off in a helicopter. A war barriers in time and place, creating a dream- zone is no place for fantasy and idealisation. like atmosphere. Coppola commented on the • These representations of women are the only madness of the film and its theme: My‘ film is ones given lengthy screen time in the film’s not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam,’ he said. ‘The first release. Coppola addressed this with the way we made it is the way Americans were in Redux release with the inclusion of two further Vietnam. We had too much money, too much scenes. The first is with an embittered and equipment and little by little we went insane.’ embattled enclave of French colonials and an • War is pointless – The Do Lung Bridge scene opium smoking Colonist who Willard joins (01:44:33) - The Do Lung Bridge – the arse- in a pipe and then sleeps with. The second hole of the world. Chief (the boat’s captain) is of two of the Playmates. Their helicopter comments on the futility of war as Willard has been grounded due to lack of fuel. Their decides to move on, up river, away from the tour manager barters time spent with them for carnage, derangement and chaos at the Do Lung fuel. The attempted sex with Lance and Chef Bridge: ‘…like this bridge, we build it every is clumsy and awkward and the girls talk in a night, Charlie blows it right back up again. distracted way with the men as if they are not Just so the generals can say the roads open’. quite present. The effect of the scene, particularly when one couple accidentally upends an occupied coffin and displays the corpse inside, CORE STUDY AREAS 3 - STARTING is very unnerving and distressing. There is no POINTS - Contexts love in their lovemaking: even Willard’s sexual Social encounter takes place through a gauze of opium • A counter-culture classic – anti-war, anti- and netting. War, it seems, distorts all beauty and government, humanist and bleak. As a document feeling – even that feminine feeling offered as of the Vietnam War (1955-1975) it is peerless. a conventional counterpoint to male brutality. • Willard arrives in the battle zone, only to Historical discover a camera crew is there before him – • One of the first films about a war still fresh Coppola is playing the director of course. The in people’s minds. Vietnam was an unpopular 3 A Level Film Studies - Focus Film Factsheet

war in the USA and around the World; it was breakdown and a near fatal heart attack. also the first TV war so negative coverage predominated in what became a war of attrition involving huge civilian casualties as well as SPECIALIST STUDY AREA - Auteur just over 360,000 USA dead or wounded. At Starting points least 2,000,000 Vietnamese civilians died. • Counter-culture - Aside from the film’s • See the boat search scene which ends in alternative take on the Vietnam War and tragedy when Willard’s trigger happy America’s interventionist policy overseas crew get spooked and kill everyone on there are many scenes of drug taking board only to find that one of the little (hash, LSD, Opium) and the liberal use children was trying to protect a puppy. of counter-culture music by artists such Political as The Doors and The Rolling Stones. • Anti-war and clearly offering a counter-culture • The film is a loose adaptation of Joseph view of American interventionist foreign policy Conrad’s anti-colonial and pessimistic and a hypocritical and ineffective military. novella, Heart of Darkness (1899). Playing on this book’s similarities with the production Technological process, Coppola’s wife released a ‘making of • The Oscar Winning sound design and editing documentary’, called Hearts of Darkness: A by was ground-breaking – Filmmaker’s Apocalypse in 1991. Coppola is using synthesisers to mimic helicopters clearly content to adapt existing literature for amongst other sounds – all helping to create a the screen, revisiting Bram Stoker’s Dracula in hallucinogenic aural atmosphere that perfectly 1992 and ’s contemporary , complements the film’s visuals. The film was The Godfather, in 1972. All of these films the first to be mixed using a computer and is and Apocalypse Now have a Catholic’s vision the first to credit anyone as a Sound Designer. of human nature corrupted (the fall of man), The film is also notable for being one of the good and evil in battle, and an epic scale. first released with or ‘Dolby • Brando can also be seen as an auteur in 5.1’: a stereo format that is now standard. this film – inflecting with his literal and Institutional metaphorical weight the whole project. As one • The film was re-released in 2001 with an extra of Hollywood’s first wave of method and 49 minutes’ worth of footage – so hardly a certainly its most famous, Brando soon gained Director’s Cut but rather a film with missing a reputation for being a difficult performer to sequences added by the director from the work with. The intensity of his performances many hours of footage originally shot. was, it seems, matched by an intense working relationship. This is clearly evidenced in his • The film won numerous awards, such as the work in Apocalypse Now for in the few scenes he 1979 Cannes Palme D’Or for Best Film and appears in he is magnetic despite having weight with 8 nominations at the 1980 Academy issues necessitating the use of a body double in Awards it won Best Cinematography and Best some long shots. Brando’s eventual obsession Sound. It also did well at the box office on with the character of Kurtz also contributed to both its initial release and its Redux release. the film’s budgetary problems. These started • The film is also interesting in seeing two when a storm destroyed sets, the Philippine generations of ‘method ’ (Brando and army requisitioned the helicopters they had Sheen) playing opposite each other – although loaned Coppolla in order to fight insurgents by all accounts neither actor was as focussed and culminated with Martin Sheen’s near fatal in terms of their method as they needed to be: heart attack. The arrival of a bloated and under- Brando turned up on set overweight and without prepared but subsequently obsessed Brando having read Conrad’s novel; Sheen had a nervous

4 A Level Film Studies - Focus Film Factsheet was the icing on a rapidly crumbling cake.

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