Conrad and Coppola and the Heart of Darkness Within

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature grade: 17 (A-) University of Bayreuth (English Literature) course: Literature and Media Transformations language: English abstract: When a great artist in one medium produces a work based on a masterpiece in the same or other medium we can expect interesting results (E. N. Dorall: Conrad and Coppola: Different Centres of Darkness).In his essay The Rethoric of Narrative in Fiction And Film film critic Seymore Chatman observes that 'a lot of ink has been spilled in recent years on film adaptations of novels (...). Too much of the discussion has centred on questions of story content with particular respect to 'fidelity' as if the source novel were some sacrosanct object whose letter as well as spirit the film had to follow.'He continues that this approach 'often leads to an unproductive prescriptivism that finds the film inadequate because it does not 'read' like the novel'. It seems that John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola who both wrote the screenplay for the movie Apocalypse Now had the same thoughts in mind when they decided to adapt Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness -as Milius stated himself - 'in some shape or form'. They certainly did not want to spill any ink and he also did not see the novel as a sacrosanct object. Apocalypse Now is not a conventional film adaptation of Conrad's novel since -at least at first glance- it does not pay particular respect to 'fidelity'; a Vietnam war movie does not seem to have much in common with a novel written in 1898 and dealing with colonialism. However it is said that HD can be seen as the 'root' for AN because 'a seventeen-year old John Milius heard his English reader Irwin Blackter extol the splendour of Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. And if we take a closer look at the movie the parallels to Conrad's novel become obvious. This essay will be divided into two major parts. The first one