Czas apokalipsy

A work that crowns the so-called “Hollywood Renaissance”—a period in which an American film industry mired in institutional crisis granted unprecedented creative freedom to auteur filmmakers—Apocalypse Now presents the reality of the Vietnam War in an extraordinarily evocative manner. Francis Ford Coppola constructs the film as a series of audiovisual variations on a single theme. The famous aerial cavalry assault led by Colonel Kilgore, framed within the conventions of cinematic spectacle, is built upon an ambivalence between its superficial grandeur and its underlying absurdity. By contrast, the battle for the Do Lung Bridge—where intensely expressive imagery is accompanied by distorted music of tawdry provenance—depicts war as a pointless nightmare. Finally, the film’s concluding sequence (in which Coppola employs one of his favoured expressive devices: parallel editing) transforms war into a blood-soaked ritual in which all participants are equally victims and executioners. 

Shortly after the film’s international premiere, Aleksander Ledóchowski wrote in a Polish magazine Film: “Coppola tends to describe his films as ‘operas’ or ‘operatic films,’ but he means this in the same sense as the ‘operatic quality’ attributed to Visconti’s cinema. Spectacle, grand staging, and a new synthesis of image, sound, and music. Behind this lies another layer of meaning, both psychological and cultural. The term ‘operatic’ conveys a certain artistic convention, but also an attempt to ritualize art—through metaphor, embodiment, and personification—rather than by literal depiction.”