Deconstructing the Scene

8/9/2019 Deconstructing the Scene

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The School of Visual Arts380 Second Ave,

New York, NY, 10010

The Art of EditingSpring 2010

Instructor: Vincent LoBrutto

Deconstructing The

Scene:

Apocalypse Now (1979)Copyright: American Zoetrope / United Artists

Directed And Produced By: Francis Ford CoppolaWritten By: John Milius,

Francis Ford Coppola,

based on novella byJoseph Conrad

Cinematography: Vittorio StoratoEdited By: Walter Murch,

Richard Marks,Gerald B. GreenbergLisa Fruchtman

Music By: Carmine Coppola,Francis Ford Coppola


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The End.

Of our elaborate plans, the End.

Of everything that stands, the End.

No safety or surprise, the End.

I'll never look into your eyes...again

With this dreamy monologue of late 60s burned rock star Jim Morrison balls of

fire engulf the seemingly peaceful jungle and off we go Apocalypse Now kicks

into high gear. And there we have it the beginning of the end, the irony of which

stretches beyond the realms of a certain motion picture and into the much wider

spectrum. We are indeed witnessing the beginning of the end the end of

civilization, which is eating itself alive, just as the fires are crackling through itssomber landscape. There is an unstoppable energy in the air, pierced by soft

swashing of helicopter blades, captivating everything around.

Ironically, we are watching the beginning of another, more mercantile end.

Francis Ford Coppolas Apocalypse Now, a motion picture mammoth, a non-

arguably one of the grandest, boldest and simply most beautiful celluloid creations

ever conceived, had taken a huge toll on its auteurs career. It has financially and

morally bankrupted its creator, forcing one of the most bankable film directors of

1970s Hollywood into oblivion of making commercially appealing and artistically flat

films for almost two decades. After several years of painstaking location shooting,

the film went almost 3 times over budget and was considered something of anextravagant, self-indulgent epic. The production experienced nearly every single

True Hollywood tabloid attribute - huge delays, sets destroyed in hurricane, crucial

cast replacements in the middle of the shoot, suicidal director, drug use, out-of-

control top billed star Marlon Brando and finally debilitating, near-fatal heart attack

for star Martin Sheen.

This picture had all signs of being a massive failure, and nevertheless

Coppola was able to achieve his original objective. Just like Alfred Hitchcock was

shooting North By Northwest as a testament to his own skill and making a picture

to end all Hitchcock pictures, Apocalypse Now became an ultimate war picture

at the time and is widely considered to retain this status today. Drawing mainelements of the story from Joseph Conrads novella Heart of Darkness, the picture

became metaphorical backdrop for corruptive madness of war, and to this day

remains outstanding evocation of its sheer madness.

Saigon Shit!

A movies opening scene is a most useful tool at artists disposal, which can


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serve different purposes altogether. Most of the times director, with the help of

cinematographer and editor, can take the advantage of audiences fresh view on

the picture they are about to see to set necessary expose, and then build the

narrative as he or she sees fit. A properly built exposition will later allow the artist to

manipulate the spectators and bend the critical elements of the motion picture in

many different ways, but the originally exposed background will always serve as asort of padded backdrop, since everything will bounce of original expectations.

On the other hand, director can also choose to not play with the audiences

expectations, but to serve a juicy main course without the appetizers. In this

respect, the opening passage to Apocalypse is the most striking example of how to

set the tone of what the audience is about to see, and go further by trying to use

visual and sound tools to relay the amount of information, worthy of substantial

literary prologue. In fact, this sequence is so powerful and self-contained, that it can

be regarded as a separate short film. Francis Coppola, Vittorio Storato and at last,

editor guru Walter Murch thrust the viewer into the world, where nature is violated

by a Man in an almost operatic sense of mutual destruction.

With no traditional studio logo to precede the films opening, we are

introduced to a beautiful wide shot of jungle palm trees, swaying peacefully in the

air, almost resembling the Garden of Eden. This peace however is almost instantly

shattered, first by swooshing sounds of helicopter blades and then by massive

aerial assault on the forest, resulting in fiery flames, engulfing it. This is the end

Jim Morrisons chilling words remind us, that one needs to make no mistake and

have no doubts about humanitys capability of destruction and violent nature of the

Man.

And this is where talent of film editing team really takes off such a set uppresents an incredibly fruitful opportunity for super-creative cutting to convey the

scenes and pictures sense of violent chaos. We are immediately introduced to

multiple dissolves and overlays, which place the main protagonist, Captain Willard

(Martin Sheen in a career defining performance) right in the middle of the orgy of

fire and violence. By laying Willards face upside down over the backdrop of forest

destruction, filmmakers achieve campy effect of pulpy Devilish presence, a

welcome throwback to Coppolas early career with master of exploitation producer

Roger Corman. The camp of the scene culminates in the effect of audience seeing

Willards eyes being almost ablaze, from reflections of explosions, which are

supposedly taking place in a totally different dimension. However, we are starting torealize that the images of burning jungle and flying choppers are as real to our

soldier as it gets, and the razor sharp feeling of confusion is deteriorating into the

moment of pure horror, which will be explored for the rest of the film. Therefore,

when jungle napalm dissolves into intensely chaotic shots of spinning ceiling fan,

the audience knows that the best of this abusive confusion is yet to come. It is had

to imagine a more effective sequence, transcending pure evils of war to almost

biblical chaos, which define this current conflict of Man versus Nature.


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Certain key elements define the sequence, which essential goal is to explore

human alienation from ones self and others through these extremely powerful

images of chaos, destruction and ultimately death. One may argue that Coppolas

view of the worlds existence is defined is Death. This is all achieved through

beautiful combination of stunning cinematography, direction and film and sound

editing:

- OPENING SCENE: Sound of helicopter blades, accelerating, before actual

images begin

- Eventually, the sound becomes muffled and distorted, signaling further

transition

- Image comes into play with various shadows, merging with peaceful

forest, almost swimming in the wind

- Cliffhanger contrasting image of napalm, soaking the trees. Jim Morrisons

The End kicks off.

- The images of destruction stay static for a while to reassure the viewer,

that Chaos Reigns

- After awhile, Captain Willards face is overlayed onto forests destruction;

The face is shown upside down

- Willards face continues to show through fires, at one point we see him

smoking a cigarette. This reinforces the scenes continuity and rubsimages in.

- Eventually, helicopter blades flow into ceiling fan of the room, where

Willard is in. Although fires are still present in the corner of the shot. There

is no escape.

- Camera pans across the hotel room. We now see the elements of

individual escape and self-destruction cigarettes, alcohol. Jim Morrisons

song continues, and lyrics become more and more drab.

- We see more ordinary elements of Willards existence: wallet, pile of

letters, photograph of a woman, presumably his wife. We then see the gun

a strong indication of suicide thoughts.

- Helicopter sounds occasionally cut into spinning fan, before the first clear

shot of Willards POV.


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Walter Murch, one of key editors on the film, is at the top of his game here,

utilizing powerful tools of editing transition to achieve perfect balance of time and

place compression. Murch used to talk about transitions and superimpositions,

particularly with respect to Apocalypse Now, and his eventual objective to create

dreamlike, almost hallucinatory state of mind of the films protagonist, before plot

narrative kicks in and Willard is off to his mission to terminate rogue U.S. Army

Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Such technique serves as a story prologue and gives

the protagonist an opportunity to experience his dream, which is soaked in

dissolves an overlays, before he gets himself together for his very real mission. Very

often, especially in contemporary editing, dissolves can become self-infatuating and

even a cheat to mask bad, mistake-filled editing technique. However, at the start of

the Apocalypse it works beautifully and achieves its goal with a bang we are

engrossed in Willards dream almost as fully as he is.

Optical effects add to incredible intensity of the scene, as it progresses into

surreal, but at the same time very real, in-your-face downward spiral into insanity.

Just as Morrisons The End swings into psychedelic frenzy, we see Willard

becoming almost psychotic, as he does frightening, half-nude dance, smashes themirror and wipes the blood all over his face and body. The scene, which by accident

incorporated Sheens own blood, as he did in fact smashed his hand by striking at

the mirror, tells us that the good old Captain Willard is dead, and in his place a new

being is reborn. Stressed by an outstanding brave performance by Sheen,

cinematic techniques are at the most virtuoso here, as we hear Sheens voice

narrating his characters transformation into essentially a dead man:


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When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd

be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said 'yes' to a divorce. When I

was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting

back into the jungle. I'm here a week now. I'm waiting for a mission

At this point, we see our protagonist waking up from his violent delusion and

getting back to reality, which is here represented by hotel room in Saigon. Murch

and team masterly merge sights and sounds of fire and choppers far, far away into

localized sounds of the room. When we hear and alarm bell go off, the audience is

at the crossroads of hyper-dreamy reality at the actual surroundings. Murch was

trying to use the device of a bell sound to represent a human reaction of a sound in

a dream, which usually translates into something completely different, when the

person is awake. Therefore the perception shifts and we, together with Captain

Willard are now awake and awaiting. He walks to the window and then realizes,

where he is, thus signaling to the audience that for a moment, life has a new

meaning. And for the new Willard, the meaning is the mission, mission to kill

The scene shows off the incredible talent of editing and cinematographic

teams, as they succeed tremendously in gradual transition of dream space into the

real world. Just in a several screen minutes, using the unique visual medium of the

art of cinema, filmmakers manage to tell the complete and coherent story of almost

Biblical proportions, juxtaposing eternal elements of our existence, such as life,

death, war, peace, man vs. nature and perceived reality. The opening sequence to

the Apocalypse is an extremely powerful prologue to one of the most mind-

bending stories of character transformation ever conceived, an epic saga of humanobsession with violence and control:

I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn't even know it yet.

Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war

like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Kurtz. It was no accident that I

got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz's memory; any more than

being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story


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without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is

mine

The Horror, The Horror.

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Deconstructing the Scene