A Level Film Studies - Focus Film Factsheet Apocalypse Now (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 Vietnam and the neighbouring Component 1: American Film (AS) countries of Laos and Cambodia. 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 Doors, ‘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 Auteur (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 Joseph Conrad’s • Francis Ford Coppola is renowned as a leading novella, Heart of Darkness. The words refer to figure of New Hollywood and an auteur; along the dark centre of human nature that is unleashed with the Godfather 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 films to critique CORE STUDY AREAS 1 - STARTING the Vietnam War. A film renowned for its POINTS - Key Elements of Film production excesses, it remains evidence of a Form (Micro Features) cult film 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-up of Kurtz a battle hardened USA special forces soldier, other than archive photographs seen earlier Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), 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 (Marlon Brando) 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 of The 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 shot in an intense BCU and upside untouched Eden by the devilish nightmare down – his world is literally and metaphorically of Napalm (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 victory. 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 Western 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 Ride of the Valkyries (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, rock music, 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 Dennis Hopper’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 dance 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 don’t surf’ scene where the phallic power of the gun is fetishized.