Focus on film Apocalypse Now elements in a specific scene (or scenes) and analyz
ID: 451011 • Letter: F
Question
Focus on film Apocalypse Now elements in a specific scene (or scenes) and analyze how the film represents a resonant issue, image, or idea in that specific scene (see the doc. "Studying Film" for advice on this). How does the setting (the Jungle, the River, the boat, the Kurtz compound, The Vietnam War), the music, editing, cinematography, the narration (written by Michael Herr, recited by Martin Sheen as Willard) or specific characters ( Lt. Colonel Killgore, the boat crew, the photojournalist in the compound, etc.) contribute to the overall mood or meaning of the scene? What resonant issues does the scene or character represent? You may focus in detail on any of the above elements or any specific scenes in your post.
Explanation / Answer
he great Soviet theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein explores the idea of creating an ‘intellectual cinema’ in three essays which were composed in 1929: Beyond the Shot, The Dramaturgy of Film Form, and The Fourth Dimension in Cinema. A central concern in these works is how a series of images can, when correctly composed by the filmmaker and then interpreted by the viewer, produce an abstract concept not strictly present in each of the composite images. He seeks to explicate this process by applying to cinema the dynamics he found in the Japanese hieroglyph. These essays, however, often feel more like brainstorming sessions then presentations of clearly formulated ideas. Part of the reason for this is that he does not subject either the kinds of meaning or the process by which meaning is produced by these ideograms to an especially rigorous analysis, but rather makes general statements which, upon inspection, seem problematic. A close analysis of such idea production, undertaken in this essay, reveals three possible kinds of ideas or mental representations: objects in reality, immaterial aspects of reality, and abstract concepts. And on the axis of combination, the rules which allow such meaning to be generated, by the hieroglyphs, is also brought out where they are assumed by Eisenstein. Against this tendency and in relation to the latter point, however, we also find in these essays an awareness of the possibility for ambiguous meanings and a search for ways to reduce or eliminate potential ambiguity. While it does not seem to be explicitly stated in the texts, Eisenstein seems to implicitly imply that this goal can be attained by setting up a dominant term which will limit the potential overflow of meaning. Interestingly, this strategy for producing meaning is one that has been explored in more recent cultural and literary studies, and which has important consequences for the notion of ideology. The following examples of the hieroglyphs are used by Eisenstein to illustrate a process of meaning generation which can be adopted by the cinema, in the service of ‘intellectual montage