Coppola's ambition
Unsurprisingly, despite being the most scheduled foreign classic (with both imax and 4k) at this year's Beijing International Film Festival, Apocalypse Now is still a "second light" when it grabs tickets – which fully shows that no matter how controversial it was that year, the 1979 film has gained "classicity". But once it is arranged in the "imax", the audience's enthusiasm for this "classic" seems to be full of expectations for the "American blockbuster" as an audiovisual feast similar to "Dunkirk", which is most likely to be disappointed, because the creative idea of "Apocalypse Now" is not to go to the "audiovisual feast", it is not easy to digest, and the "blockbuster" audience may take a nap in the movie theater.
French director Claude Chabrol divides cinema into two broad categories: one is ideological and the other is sensual. Although this division is a bit simple and crude, it is not rough. Francis Coppola undoubtedly really falls into the former category, which is rare among American directors. Why "real"? Because ideological films don't necessarily have to use long lenses in movies to "think", stuffing the names of philosophers and writers. Many directors, such as Woody Allen, are often misplaced to the former...
Apocalypse Now is Coppola's ambition (although it was initially decided to be directed by George Lucas, the creative core has always been Coppola's own). While it doesn't inject deep ideas into a simple story like Dialogue (1974), it's a lot more complex and in-depth than The Godfather (1972), which has become a textbook movie (there is a theory that Coppola made The Godfather to build money for Apocalypse Now). If Coppola films belong to the elite culture of the United States, it is probably not necessarily very wrong. The elitism is not in the fact that their family has won 9 Oscars in three generations, but in the contribution to the times and social thought. Being able to insist on one's judgment like a madman despite budget overruns, severe cycle delays (the 6-week filming of "Apocalypse Now" was filmed for a year and a half), a critique of killing, and even rebellion, is really not something that ordinary people can do.
40 years later, it has not diminished the shock and enlightenment of the audience's thinking, but our acceptance is even more narrow. For example, it is absolutely easy for us to be brainwashed by entertainment films to point out a "problem" at the end: Why is Kurtz so easy to be killed by Willard, since he has a high IQ?
An immersive journey to understanding "evil."
Apocalypse Now is a truly "immersive" film. However, it is by no means the kind of high-tech audio-visual surround that we understand one-sidedly and superficially today to bring people sensory stimulation to "immersion". The immersion of this film is on the psychological level, the ideological level. It's an immersive journey of following the characters to know "evil" and to know the "heart of darkness."
There's an easily overlooked shot: When Lieutenant Willard and his party are on a mission and first come into contact with Colonel Kilgo, war correspondents are making newsreels there, and they seem to inadvertently say to these American soldiers that we are making a movie — and this nightmare journey has begun. So, is this a movie within a movie, or is it a big dream? The actors who shoot the scenes don't know whether they are "just acting in a movie" or experiencing a harsh, real life.
As with the controversy over this year's Lev Landau, Coppola trapped these inexperienced actors (the only big star, Marlon Brando, was involved in filming for a short time) on a small island in the Philippines for more than a year, almost isolated from the world, leaving them physically and mentally devastated to get the real effects that directors needed — such as making them really smoke marijuana, which of course involved an ethical issue. The male lead, Lieutenant Willard' character, Martin Sheen, also had to stop filming for two months in the middle of a heart attack.
However, being trapped on the island for so long was not the director's intention, and after arriving at the Location in the Philippines, Coppola found that a lot of paper content was difficult to implement on this small island, which was much longer than expected, and the budget was seriously overspended. Including the helicopters we see, gasoline bombs, etc., there is no support from the US military. Although you are an Oscar winner, Coppola can not be willful, because that is equivalent to being an enemy of many people, but for "Apocalypse Now" he is still willful, so this movie he basically completed in a single-handed confrontation mentality. If the film's critical character is unprecedented, it is closely related to this closed, heterogeneous space.
Revelation Of the Evil of the Four Horsemen and Soldiers
Today, "Apocalypse Now" is good in that it has not been filmed into an American main theme. It is common sense that most of Hollywood's so-called blockbusters are american themes, especially war themes. Another great thing about Apocalypse Now is that it wasn't made into the usual "anti-war film." In fact, the anti-war films of American movies, "Deer Hunter", "Field Platoon", and even "First Blood" in a sense are all uncompromising American themes. And "Apocalypse Now" only uses the background of the Vietnam War, which is beyond these genre films.
In the current international context, the story of Apocalypse Now is actually very easy to "substitute": CIA sends a mentally suspicious killer to kill an officer who betrayed the United States, who fought in the Vietnam War and now establishes a terrorist organization in the heart of Asia to oppose American ideology. This is a very profound topic, because Colonel Kurtz's unscrupulous "lascivious primitive father", Yuan Le, is a naked embodiment of the structural excess of state power in the United States, just as the North Vietnamese guerrillas in the past or the organization of bin Laden in the past were originally cultivated by the United States itself, and the United States still does this today.
What Coppola is going to shoot is horror — or, "this thing." One key word associated with this is "hypocrisy." For, in Coppola's own words, hypocrisy is the product of fear.
For Western audiences, the film has two distinct subtexts, namely the story of the Four Horsemen of Revelation in the Bible and Joseph Conrad's famous book Dark Heart, so it is somewhat prepared for Western audiences, and it is difficult to understand the director's intentions without being familiar with these two texts.
There is no doubt that the relationship between Revelation and this film is absolute (another film that is absolutely related but much more optimistic is Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal). The original English name is apocalypse now, so please note that now is used here, not a modern that we might take for granted. The Book of Revelation is a revelation of calamity, and this revelation is the declaration of God's absolute sovereignty over calamity: Christ the Lamb rules a chaotic world through four knights: the knight on a white horse with a bow, who represents the rule (the totalitarian rule promised by politicians to achieve peace), is often interpreted as the "pseudochrist"; the knight on the red horse with a knife, who brings war (including assassinations, riots, and other violence), and is most closely related to the film's protagonist, Willard; and the black horse knight with the balance, who brings famine The Grey Horse Knight who brought the plague holds the key to death. The four knights seem to have their own duties, but in fact they are one. They are all blazing with tears, because the desires of their hearts can never be satisfied. They are ugly because of the darkness and desire in their hearts.
In Coppola's film, the Vietnamese side is only a background board in the film, and all American soldiers are part of these knights. Whether it's Colonel Kurtz, an elite West Point, a seemingly innocuous former American surf star, or a hippie virgin who loves peace, their darkest side is exposed in this "dark center", where these soldiers indiscriminately kill small fishing boats of Vietnamese civilians, only because they suspect that something is hidden on the boat.
Once the hypocrisy of those American "years are quiet" is exposed, many viewers cannot accept it. But Coppola himself said it well, "hypocrisy" is one of the most dangerous of the Four Horsemen of Revelation, and the root of the Vietnam War is "hypocrisy." Willard's final overlap with Colonel Kurtz's image suggests that this "center of darkness" is not disappearing, but is about to move on to the next stop. So, "Who's responsible for all this"? It is these desperate American soldiers who ask the most important questions in the film, and Coppola does not provide the answer, because the answer was originally established, but since "God is dead", it had to be suspended for the time being.
The myth of modern man after "God is dead"
When Coppola came to the island, she was said to have brought no script, but only a copy of Joseph Conrad's novel Dark Heart. Whether this claim is true or not, it is an indisputable fact that Apocalypse Now is adapted from Dark Hearts.
Readers who like Anglo-American literature have probably read the novella classic Dark Heart. In fact, Conrad was Polish and relied on self-taught English. In this respect, he, like Nabokov, was a Slav who created English literary classics in a non-native language. Set against the backdrop of the 19th century British Empire's frenzied colonization of the world, "Dark Heart" tells the story of a journalist named Kurtz who becomes the manager of the African Domestic Trade Station (mainly engaged in the ivory business), who thinks that he wants to send the seeds of Western civilization to the "barbarians", but loses himself in the killing and plundering time and again, and is worshipped by the "barbarians", and finally loses control, shouting "horror" to die.
There is certainly no problem in studying the relationship between this novel and colonialism, and the evils of colonialism shown in the novel and the vague colonialist stance of the novel author can provide evidence for the study, but Kurtz's last sentence "terror" is more interesting. In the novel, Marlowe, who is looking for Kurtz, ends up hiding his last words from Kurtz's fiancée, pretending that he finally shouted his fiancée's name. But Marlowe's sense of "horror" is obvious: "His heart is an impenetrable darkness. I look at him like you lean over a man lying under a cliff and not seeing the sun all day. ”
The perceptive and clever Coppola decisively chooses the most profound part of the novel and rewrites Marlowe, replacing him with Lieutenant Willard, turning it into the story of a man who goes against the current to find the legend, discovering that the legend is just another face of his own, and he will replace it.
This change has made a film classic, and it has also become a model of literary adaptation - excellent literary screen is to improve, is to lead our spirit to a higher level. Coppola makes the story no longer stop at the confrontation between colonization and anti-colonialism, or the degeneration and collapse of Western civilization, or even more than just "we all have a dark heart in us."
The essence of this film is the myth of modern man after "God is dead". It is about the polarity of man, on both sides of the good and the evil. In a small boat, it completes a new Odyssey journey through the rainforests of Asia: a young man swims against the current in search of his father, discovering what a brutal father he is, and he eventually becomes such a man.
The depth of this myth is due to Nietzsche.
It's a Nietzschean opera —not because of Nietzsche's idol Wagner—in which Colonel Kilgo and his party travel in a military helicopter, turn on the stereo to the maximum, and indiscriminately strafe and bomb Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians with machine guns and petrol bombs in the stirring theme music of Wagner's Valkyrie—this film is about the rope-walker at the beginning of "What Zarathustra Says" —we have to use the soft rope that hangs between the market and the masses to go from "primitive man" to "primitive man" Sacred man", the two ends of the soft rope are the two sides of the good and evil, because we have gone too far on the road of "primitive man" and can no longer turn back, it is a road of self-destruction, and if we are slightly intimidated by the clown, we will fall down and fall to our deaths like people who walk the rope. If we are to be free from this horror, we must learn to be "holy people."
Why did Colonel Kurtz let Willard kill himself? Because he had gone too far and had to be stopped, why did Willard kill him? Actually killing him is equivalent to killing a part of yourself! And whether Willard finally chose to go the other way, the director gave an open answer. Therefore, the death of Kurtz is the most uncontroversial, because as the director himself said, history has developed to this stage, many things have not worked, and new ideas, new myths have to be needed. The movie is a warning sign, not a killing game. Today, we should recognize this level of significance.
Text | Hei Zeming Editing | Chen Kaiyi
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