The School of Visual Arts

380 Second Ave,

New York, NY, 10010

The Art of Editing

Spring 2010
Instructor: Vincent LoBrutto

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

Directed And Produced By: Francis Ford Coppola

Written By: John Milius,
Francis Ford Coppola,
based on novella by
Joseph Conrad
Cinematography: Vittorio Storato
Edited By: Walter Murch,
Richard Marks,
Gerald B. Greenberg
Lisa Fruchtman
Music By: Carmine Coppola,
Francis Ford Coppola
“…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 its
somber 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 Coppola’s “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 auteur’s 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 an
extravagant, 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 main
elements of the story from Joseph Conrad’s 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 movie’s opening scene is a most useful tool at artists’ disposal, which can
serve different purposes altogether. Most of the times director, with the help of
cinematographer and editor, can take the advantage of audience’s 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 a
sort of ‘padded’ backdrop, since everything will bounce of original expectations.

On the other hand, director can also choose to not play with the audience’s
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 film’s 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 Morrison’s chilling words remind us, that one needs to make no mistake and
have no doubts about humanity’s capability of destruction and violent nature of the
Man.

And this is where talent of film editing team really takes off – such a set up
presents an incredibly fruitful opportunity for super-creative cutting to convey the
scene’s and picture’s 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 Willard’s face upside down over the backdrop of forest
destruction, filmmakers achieve campy effect of pulpy Devilish presence, a
welcome throwback to Coppola’s early career with master of exploitation producer
Roger Corman. The camp of the scene culminates in the effect of audience seeing
Willard’s eyes being almost ablaze, from reflections of explosions, which are
supposedly taking place in a totally different dimension. However, we are starting to
realize 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.
 Certain key elements define the sequence, which essential goal is to explore
human alienation from one’s self and others through these extremely powerful
images of chaos, destruction and ultimately death. One may argue that Coppola’s
view of the world’s 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 Morrison’s

“The End” kicks off.

- The images of destruction stay static for a while to reassure the viewer,
that ‘Chaos Reigns’

- After awhile, Captain Willard’s face is overlayed onto forest’s destruction;

The face is shown upside down

- Willard’s face continues to show through fires, at one point we see him
smoking a cigarette. This reinforces the scene’s continuity and rubs
images 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 Morrison’s
song continues, and lyrics become more and more drab.

- We see more ordinary elements of Willard’s 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 Willard’s POV.
 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 film’s 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 Willard’s 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 Morrison’s ‘The End’ swings into psychedelic frenzy, we see Willard
becoming almost psychotic, as he does frightening, half-nude dance, smashes the
mirror and wipes the blood all over his face and body. The scene, which by accident
incorporated Sheen’s 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 Sheen’s voice
narrating his character’s transformation into essentially a dead man:
 “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 human
obsession 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
without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is
mine…”

The Horror, The Horror….