Midterm Study Guide -- Spring 2008 -- part 2 (films!)

  Now let's have something more than this picture of Martin Sheen as Willard!

At this point, we've seen scenes from three films.  I am going to take out the copy of A Doll's House that the Rockville campus' library has, but I will include any information from that film on the study guide for drama/theater.

Apocalypse Now (1979) dir. Francis Ford Coppola (who also directed The Godfather--parts 1, 2, and 3).  According to Coppola at the time, "This isn't a film about Vietnam.  This is Vietnam."  The cast included Martin Sheen (Willard), Marlon Brando (Kurtz), Robert Duvall (Lt.Col. Kilgore, the officer with the cavalry hat), a very young Laurence Fishburne (Clean, one of the men on the boat), Albert Hall (Chief, the captain of the boat), Frederic Forrest (Chef, another of the men on the boat), Timothy Bottoms (Lance, the surfer on the boat), and Dennis Hopper (the photojournalist/a revision of the Russian in Heart of Darkness).

Jane Eyre (1944) dir. Robert Stevenson.  The novelist Aldous Huxley was among the screenwriters for this film.  In a number of scenes, Jane's narration appears as highlighted text in a book.  Some of this narration is not Bronte's novel but Huxley et al's screenplay.  Similarly, Dr. Rivers, the one adult who is kind to Jane, appears in the film but not in the book.  Joan Fontaine plays Jane as an adult; Peggy Anne Garner plays her as a child.  Orson Welles plays Mr. Rochester, her Byronic employer and later husband.  Margaret O'Brien plays Jane's pupil and Mr. Rochester's illegitimate daughter, Adele.   With this film's deep focus, it is hard to believe that it was filmed on a set and not at an actual castle.

David Copperfield (1999) -- This version of Dickens' novel (the closest thing we'll probably ever get to his autobiography) stars Daniel Radcliffe as the young David Copperfield.  We saw the following scenes: the evening that David is born to his widowed mother (his aunt Betsy Trotwood visits), David's term at a bad school (Ian McKellan plays the foul-tempered teacher), and his visit from Barkis (who will later marry David's nurse Peggotty) and Peggotty's nephew Ham.  At this bad school, David nevertheless meets Steerforth, a spoiled young man who becomes the boy's protector.

Which of these films would you include in a film and literature course?

Apocalypse Now & Other Films

It was wonderful to meet everyone and to note how many of you are involved in the arts!  I was impressed by how many of you are knowledgeable about film, art, and music.  This augurs well for EN 202.  Perhaps we will look at more world film than Apocalypse Now and Raise the Red Lantern.

Because I already have a few blog entries on Heart of Darkness, I'd like to write one on Apocalypse Now.  It's an outstanding film, and you can probably see from the image above how impressive it is visually.  And this image is not the most iconic one I could find!

In case you need a refresher on Apocalypse Now, here are some useful web sites.

I have always found IMBD's web sites to be useful:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/

This site is a little more detailed, providing some of the history of the filming itself.  Director Francis Ford Coppola had originally wanted Orson Welles to play Kurtz.  Imagine that casting!

http://www.filmsite.org/apoc.html

For a summary of this film, see this site:

http://mural.uv.es/inaber/plot.htm

Here is Roger Ebert's 1979 review of Apocalypse Now.  (The first version of the film was shown in 1979, five years after the end of the Vietnam War.)

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19790601/REVIEWS/41214002/1023

John Patterson of The Guardian interviewed Martin Sheen (Willard) around the time that the second version of Apocalypse Now came out:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,585052,00.html

Gaby Wood interviews an actress who was in the scenes cut from the first version of AN:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,591320,00.html

A student at MIT reviews the second version of AN:

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V121/N31/Apocalypse_Now_.31a.html

If you need more information about the Vietnam War, this site from PBS may be useful:

http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/

The war was incredibly controversial.  Here are some other viewpoints:

http://www.vietnamwar.com/

http://www.vietnampix.com/intro.htm

http://www.time.com/time/archive/collections/0,21428,c_vietnam_war,00.shtml

On the other hand, do Vietnam and Apocalypse Now get in the way of our understanding Heart of Darkness?  Here is a link to information about Fitzcarraldo, German filmmaker Werner Herzog' story about a man who was determined to bring opera (and a riverboat) to the South American jungle:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050828/REVIEWS08/508280301/1023

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083946/

Perhaps this film might help us understand Heart of Darkness a little more.

Imagine Orson Welles' Heart of Darkness

While I was looking through a blog for another literature course that I had taught, I found an entry on filmmaker Orson Welles' adaptation of Heart of Darkness, one of his many projects that never reached completion for various reasons (political, economic, psychological). 

Welles was working on his adaptation of Heart of Darkness in 1939.  This would have been about the time that Germany attacked Poland, Great Britain entered the war, and the United States was officially neutral.  Even though many Americans were beginning to realize what Hitler was "up to," many others (like Charles Lindbergh, for example) did not believe that we should be involved in Europe's war.  And, yes, Welles' Heart of Darkness appears to have been "political," portraying Kurtz as a charismatic fascist, and, as Clinton Heylin suggests, this film was never made because of its politics.

I guess I had better look a little further for an apolitical Heart of Darkness! 

Until then, here is a link to a site about another of Welles' projects: The Mercury Theater, a radio program whereby he adapted a number of novels, plays, and short stories for performance on the radio.  Conrad's novella was one of the works that Welles adapted.  Oddly enough, it is paired with a lighter story, "Life with Father."

http://www.mercurytheatre.info

For more information about Welles' Heart of Darkness, see this article from The Guardian:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1429851,00.html

Or this entry from a blog on Welles and his art:

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=78