Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now

There are two lectures here: the one from 2014 is a full Arts One lecture on the film. The one from 2015 is just half a lecture (50 minutes); the first half was a lecture on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Faculty: Jon Beasley-Murray
Lecture date: March 31, 2014
Theme: Remake/Remodel

In this lecture, Jon Beasley-Murray argues that in Coppola’s film, the fantasy of an investment with Kurtz is much stronger than in Conrad’s novella (on which it is based), but ironically all the more impossible. Coppola’s dream is to do away with the technology that has made this war crazy. But without that same technology, the film itself could not be made. He fears that we are in a war without end(s), only exacerbated by the media used to record it.

Faculty: Derek Gladwin
Lecture date: March 9, 2015
Theme: Repetition Compulsion

In this lecture, Derek Gladwin talks about the degree to which this film revisits Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and deviates from it (the students had just read Conrad’s novella), the style of filmaking that this film could be said to fit into, the historical and cultural context of the film, and cultural and literary references in the film.

Note that the videorecording was set to automatically stop at a certain time, and the lecture wasn’t quite finished at that time, so some got cut off at the end. Also, the lecturer showed some clips from the film which, due to copyright, we can’t record and show on a public website, so those parts have been cut out of the videorecording.

The video plus sides can be seen on the UBC Media Site system.

The video without slides is also available on YouTube:

• Mediasite (video for 2014 lecture plus slides)
• Powerpoint (pdf slides for 2014 lecture)
• Powerpoint (slide presentation for 2014 lecture)
• Link to the presentation for the 2015 lecture on Prezi

See also Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

1. How does Coppola translate Conrad’s imagery of light and dark (in Heart of Darkness) into the medium of film?
2. Compare Kurtz’s last words in Coppola’s film (“the horror”) to their appearance in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
3. Conrad’s Marlow does not kill Kurtz, but Coppola’s Willard does. Discuss.
4. Discuss the representation of globality—the connections among the disparate spaces and states of the earth—in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.