Back in 2009, the musician who goes by the name “Cheesy Nirvosa” began experimenting with ambient music, before eventually launching a YouTube channel where he “composes longform space and scifi ambience.” Or what he otherwise calls “ambient geek sleep aids.” Click on the video above, and you can get lulled to sleep listening to the ambient droning sound–get ready Blade Runner fans!– heard in Rich Deckard’s apartment. It runs a good continuous 12 hours.
You’re more a Star Trek fan? Ok, try nodding off to the idling engine noise of a ship featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Mr. Nirvosa cleaned up a sample from the show and then looped it for 24 hours. That makes for one long sleep.
Or how about 12 hours of ambient engine noise generated by the USCSS Nostromo in Alien?
Finally, and perhaps my favorite, Cheesy created a 12 hour clip of the ambient sounds made by the Tardis, the time machine made famous by the British sci-fi TV show, Doctor Who. But watch out. You might wake up living in a different time and place.
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“I’m tired of politics, I just want to talk about my art,” I sometimes hear artists—and musicians, actors, writers, etc.—say. And I sometimes see their fans say, “you should shut up about politics and just talk about your art.” Given the current onslaught of political news, commentary, scandal, and alarm, these are both understandable sentiments. But anyone who thinks that art and politics once occupied separate spheres harbors a historically naïve belief. The arts have always been political, and all the more so during times of high drama and tension like the one we live in now. We can look, for example, to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, or Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, just to mention three particularly striking historical examples.
The political acts of avant-garde artists like Picasso in the 20th century were as much revolutions in form as in content, and we begin to see the most radical statements emerge in the teens and twenties with Dada, Surrealism, and other modernisms: sometimes explicitly political in their orientation—spanning the gamut from anarchism to fascism—sometimes more subtly partisan.
This period was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the Golden Age of the arts journal, when every movement, circle, and splinter group in Europe and the U.S. had its own publication. For many years now, Princeton University’s Blue Mountain Project, a joint effort from “scholars, librarians, curators, and digital humanities researchers,” has archived complete issues of several such journals, and we’ve featured a couple notable examples in previous posts.
Now we direct your attention to the full online library, where you’ll find issues of Poesia (top), published by F.T. Marinetti between 1905 and 1920. This magazine represents “the transition from Italy’s engagement with an international Symbolist movement to an increasingly nationalist Futurism” and features the work of Marinetti, Alfred Jarry, W.B. Yeats, Paolo Buzzi, Emilio Notte, and James Joyce. Below Poesia, from the other side of the spectrum, we see the cover of a 1920 issue of Action, a “literary and artistic magazine associated with Individualist Anarchism,” and featuring work from writers like André Malraux, Antonin Artaud, and Paul Éluard, and artwork from Demetrios Galanis and Robert Mortier, to name just a few.
Not every avant-garde arts journal had a clear ideological mission, but they all represented aesthetic programs that strongly reacted against the status quo. The artists of the so-called Vienna Secession broke away from Association of Austrian Artists to protest its conservatism. Their journal, Ver Sacrum, further up, joined the flowing, intricate, and passionate designs of Art Nouveau and German Jugendstil artists, who created the look of the Weimar Republic and the Jazz Age. Contributors included Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, and Josef Hoffmann.
Sometimes avant-garde journals reflected political conflicts between warring factions of artists, as in the example of Le coeur à barbe: journal transparent, “produced by Tristan Tzara as a response to the attacks on him by Francis Picabia and André Breton about the future of the Dada movement.” Other publications aimed to expand the boundaries of national culture, as with Broom, above, a “self-proclaimed international magazine of arts and literature… a sumptuous journal that introduced American audiences to the European avant-garde.” Whatever their stated mission and implicit or explicit slant, it’s fair to say that the radical art published in avant-garde journals between the turn of the century and the end of the 1920s did everything but stand on the sidelines.
Stability or cultural vitality: many nations seem as if they can only have one or the other. The Republic of Guinea, for instance, has endured quite a turbulent history, yet its musicians have also enjoyed roles as “pioneers in the creation of African popular music styles and as the voice of a new Africa.” That’s the view of the University of Melbourne’s Graeme Counsel, who over the past decade has made a series of trips to the Guinean capital of Conakry on a mission to preserve the great variety of music, part of the tradition now broadly labeled “Afropop,” recorded during the decades of state-sponsored cultural abundance after the country gained independence from France in 1958.
“Under the leadership of music lover President Ahmed Sékou Touré,” writes Hyperallergic’s Allison Meier, “the government was soon sending out guitars, saxophones, and brass instruments to 35 state-funded prefecture orchestras as part of a new authenticité policy.
This directive encouraged a cultural revival that mixed traditional sounds with contemporary music, particularly Cuban and Latin rhythms.” The effort had its own record label called Syliphone, which recorded and distributed this new Guinean music until the mid-1980s, and the powerful radio signal of Radiodiffusion Télévision Guinée (RTG) turned listeners on to it well beyond the new country’s borders.
Counsel, already a collector of Syliphone records, discovered during his PhD research in 2001 that the Guinean government still held a collection of that era’s music (though “a large part of the archive had been destroyed in 1985 when the RTG was bombed by Guinean artillery during an unsuccessful coup”). Applying for and receiving, ultimately, three rounds of funding from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, he set about digitizing and cataloging the unexpectedly numerous and perhaps expectedly disorganized and poorly maintained reels of magnetic tape he found, working through bureaucratic hassles, coups d’état, and even a massacre.
“Nothing would deter me,” writes Counsel in a series of essays (part one, part two, part three) on the project, “not the authorities’ indifference towards the sound archive, not the recalcitrance oftheir attitudes, nor the tragedies of everyday life in Guinea. Nothing.” The fruits of his labors have now become available at the British Library’s online Syliphone archive, which boasts over 8,000 Guinean Afropop tracks recorded over 26 years. Meier names among the “legendary” music it makes available “the loose rhythms of the Bembeya Jazz National, the horn-heavy melodies of the Super Boiro Band, the Latin-influenced beats of Orchestre de la Paillote, and the all-women Cuban-infused les Amazones de Guinée.” Those musicians’ names may not ring a bell for you now, but a little time with the archive will guarantee a long-term inability to get their songs out of your head.
“Triumph of the Will,” says Dan Olson of the analytical video series Folding Ideas, “is not a triumph of cinema.” Already the proposition runs counter to what many of us learned in film studies classes, whose professors assured us that Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 glorification of Nazi Germany, despite its thoroughly propagandistic nature, still counts as a serious achievement in film art. “None of the ideas or techniques were new,” Olson explains. “It is simply that no one had previously thrown enough money and resources at propaganda on this scale before.”
If it has value as nothing but sheer spectacle, does Triumph of the Will (watch it below) amount to the Transformers of its day — and with motives that make Michael Bay blockbusters look like noble, altruistic endeavors at that? Despite doing nothing new with its medium, the film does still showcase certain qualities of propaganda that, more than 70 years after the fall of the Third Reich, we’d all do well to keep in mind and keep an eye on.
Olson quotes “Ur-Fascism,” an essay by Umberto Eco (who spent a couple formative years “among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another”) explaining that, for fascist leaders to convince people to follow them,
the followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
Here we have summarized both a message that Triumph of the Will wants to convey and the intellectual Achilles’ heel of fascist propaganda. It must imply the strength of the enemies even as it makes the strength of the regime crushingly explicit. “To the modern viewer it may seem aimless and shoddily paced,” says Olson, “with montages that just go on and on and on long after the point has been made, but that’s the point: it is not merely a demonstration of presence, but of volume. The indulgence of it, the conspicuous cost, is as much a message of the film as any other.”
The words of Hannah Arendt, who once called science “only a surrogate for power,” also enter into the analysis. Olson uses the quote to get into the idea that “one of the main mechanisms of propaganda is to plant the idea of precedent, to alter the audience’s own sense of history and the world and appeal to the seemingly objective authorities of god, history and science” in order to, through what Eco called the “cult of tradition,” make “new institutions seem older than they really are.”
We might find all this a bit funny, given the highly premature termination of a reign the Nazis insisted could endure for a thousand years, but in some sense their propagandists had the last laugh. Whatever its cinematic merits or lack thereof,Riefenstahl’s film remains essentially effective. “To this day we continue to use Triumph of the Will as a reference point for our mental construct of the Nazi regime,” says Olson. “Our idea of the Nazis is deeply informed by a propaganda film produced by the Nazis for the explicit purpose of creating that mental construct.” When we think of the Nazis, in other words, we still think of the images manufactured more than eighty years ago by Triumph of the Will — “exactly the image they wanted you to think of when you thought of them.”
When Umberto Eco died last year at the age of 84, he left behind a sizable body of work and a vast collection of books. He wrote such hefty and much-read novels as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum as well as stories for children, pieces of literary criticism, academic texts on semiotics, studies of everything from medieval aesthetics to modern media, and much else besides, but as we recently noted, he also advised against becoming too prolific. Not for him the life of “those novelists who publish a book every year,” thus missing out on the “pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to tell a story.”
Still, the man wrote a lot. He also read a lot, as a glance at a chapter or two from any one of his own novels will attest. An avowed fan of James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, Eco wove into his work countless threads pulled from the literary and intellectual history of a host of different places, cultures, and languages — evidence of a well-stocked mind indeed, but a well-stocked mind requires a well-stocked library, or libraries.
We can only imagine how many such citadels of knowledge Eco visited in his travels all over the world, but we don’t have to imagine the one he built himself, since we can see it in the video above. Though not infinite like the library of all possible books imagined by Borges, Eco’s private home library looks, from certain angles, nearly as big. The camera follows Eco as he passes shelf after packed shelf, some lining the walls and others standing free, eventually finding his way to one volume in particular — despite the fact that he apparently shelved very few of his books with their spines facing outward.
According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, quoted by Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Eco’s library contained 30,000 books and tended to separate visitors into two categories: ‘those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.” By that measure, Eco might have amassed an even more valuable library than his fans would assume.
It takes a special kind of person to calmly debate those who prefer dogma to reason and who insist on ignoring or distorting evidence to suit their preconceptions. Carl Sagan was such a person. Among his many other scientific accomplishments, he became legendary for his skill as an educator and science advocate. Sagan communicated not only his knowledge, but also his awe and wonder at the beauty and intricacy of the universe, bringing to his explanations an unrivaled enthusiasm, clarity, and talent for poetic expression. And when faced with interlocutors who were less than intellectually honest, Sagan kept his cool and carried on.
This could be difficult. In the audio from a radio call-in show above, we hear Sagan answer questions from a caller with a clear, and rather foolhardy agenda: to best the astronomer, astrophysicist, and astrobiologist in a debate over Darwinian evolution. He begins right away with some ad hominem, calling Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan “true believers, who are no more willing to question the theory that you base your beliefs on than were the ministers of the 19th century who you regularly criticize as being close-minded.” The irony of accusations like these should be obvious. Though the caller doesn’t announce himself as a creationist, it’s abundantly clear to Sagan from his talking points that he’s defending a creationist party line.
Sagan attempts to answer his first question, but before he can finish, the caller leaps to another bullet point, the “gaps in the theory” or “gaping hole” of “fossils in transition.” Sagan presses his claim, with evidence, that “the Darwinian concept of evolution and natural selection is profoundly verified.” The insistent caller again interrupts and Sagan almost gives up on him, saying he “rather reminds me of Pontius Pilate. He asks, ‘what is truth?’ but does not stay for the answer.’” Then Sagan, without hesitation, patiently makes a case in brief:
Consider artificial selection. There is something particularly implausible about natural selection, particularly if you think that the world is only a few thousand years old, as the Biblical chronology would have it. Then the idea of one species flowing into another is absurd, we never see that in our everyday life, we are told. But consider, for example, the variety of dogs on the planet… We humans made them… by controlling which dogs shall mate with which…. In the short period of 8 or 10,000 years, we produce this immense variety of dogs. Now compare that with four billion years of biological evolution, not artificial selection, but natural selection, which goes into not just the overall personality and characteristics of the dog, but the biochemistry and internal organs… and then it is clear that the beauty and diversity of life on earth can emerge. But if you don’t buy four billion years, you don’t buy evolution.
Sagan frequently cited this figure of 4 billion years for the origin of life on Earth. During his hugely popular program Cosmos, for example, he used the number in an accelerated evolutionary history, which you can hear him narrate accompanied by a nifty animation in the video below. Most scientists have used that figure or a few million years earlier. For some time, the actual number was thought to be between 3.6 and 3.8 billion years. Recently, as Tim Marcin reports at the International Business Times, some scientists have concluded that “living organisms may have existed on Earth as long as 4.1 billion years ago.”
Marcin quotes UCLA professor of geochemistry Mark Harrison, who speculates, “life on Earth may have started almost instantaneously” (relatively speaking) after the planet’s formation some 4.6 billion years ago. These estimates come from carbon dating, not fossils, but just yesterday, Sarah Kaplan writes at The Washington Post, discoveries of “tiny, tubular structures uncovered in ancient Canadian rocks” may be evidence of ancient microbes thought to be 3.77 billion years old, “making them the oldest fossils ever found.”
Like all new scientific discoveries, these recent findings have been contested by other scientists in these fields. And like some discoveries, their questions may never be resolved in our lifetimes. Science depends on methods of data collection, evaluation and interpretation of evidence, peer review, and many other processes subject to human error. Scientists must often revise their conclusions and reconsider theories. No scientific explanation is conclusively definitive in all its particulars. Nonetheless, Sagan believed that only through the scientific method could we obtain knowledge about the cosmos and the origin of life on earth that was in any way reliable. He admired religious ethics and the space religions held for the big questions. Sagan even declared in his 1985 Gifford Lectures (published posthumously as The Varieties of Scientific Experience) that “the objectives of religion and science… are identical or very nearly so.” But he did not think religions could answer the questions they asked.
Icelandic folk group Árstíðir know a good acoustic cathedral when they see one, even when it’s in a train station. In the above video, the sextet was returning from a concert in Wuppertal, Germany, when they were struck by the acoustic properties of this one section of the train terminal.
Indeed, this was a fine place to stop and offer a special encore to their show, a performance of the early 13th century Icelandic hymn “Heyr himna smiður” (“Hear, Smith of Heavens”) by Kolbeinn Tumason.
Hearing this music strips away the concrete and the industrial revolution and we are suddenly back in the mists of time…even when the tannoy speakers in the background announce a train departure. In fact, it just adds another layer of atmosphere to this beautiful work. The sparse crowd stops and just listens. It’s a beautiful video that has earned over six million views in the nearly four years it has been online.
Composer Kolbeinn Tumason is best known for this hymn–you can see a translation of the lyrics here–and was both a deeply religious man and one of the most powerful chieftains in Iceland. He met his maker at age 34 in a battle between religious and secular clans, where his head was bashed in by a rock. Still, the history goes, he held on long enough to write this hymn on his deathbed, and it remains an oft-performed work.
Hopefully no such battlefield fate awaits the group Árstíðir, who formed in Reykjavik in 2008 and continue to perform, though their style is closer to Fleet Foxes than this 13th century timeslip might indicate.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Perhaps taking a cue from Moby, the Relax Sleep ASMR YouTube channel has also assembled a “video” offering 10 hours of Arctic ambient music, featuring the sounds of the frozen ocean, ice cracking, snow falling, [an] icebreaker idling and [a] distant howling wind sound.”
Click play above and you can enjoy “white noise sounds generated by the wind and snow falling, combined with deep low frequencies with delta waves from the powerful … idling engines” of a Polar Icebreaker. Very chill.
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When I find myself in times of musical trouble, Captain Beefheart comes to me. His Marcel Duchamp-meets-James Brown shtick goes places no other experimental prog-blues-jazz artist ever has—places of absurdist virtuosity where the gap between the artist and the mask disappears, where words and music have relationships that defy physical laws. Many have tried, but few have so well succeeded in the wild ambition to make surrealist verse cohere in songs that defy all traditional arrangements. For my experimental rock dime, no one has mastered the art so well as Beefheart and his Magic Band.
In fact, every musician, I believe, should sometimes ask themselves, “what would Captain Beefheart do?” But what about Beefheart’s relationship with the other arts? We probably know that the man also named Don Van Vliet was a prolific abstract painter throughout his career, the medium he chose for the last 28 years of his life after he hung up his saxophone in 1982. But did his “strange uncle of post-punk” musical sensibilities translate into poetry, a related but quite different art than that of even the most abstract songwriting?
Well, if Bob Dylan can win a Nobel Prize—and why not?—I see no reason why we can’t consider the work of Captain Beefheart literary art. And in addition to his extraordinary Dadaist songs, Beefheart penned restrained, masterfully imagistic poems with wry humor and crystalline intelligence. His work surely belongs in Alan Kaufman’s Outlaw Bible of American Poetry right next to that of Dylan, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Tupac Shakur, Gil Scott-Heron, Jim Morrison, the Beats, and dozens more non-musical writers. But it seems that Beefheart’s literary genius has been mostly overlooked.
That’s unfortunate. In tense, vividly observed poems like “A Tin Peened Reindeer,” he approaches the elliptical mystery of Wallace Stevens and the baroque language of John Ashbery. Late songs like “The Thousandth and Tenth Day of the Human Totem Pole” condense the grotesque imaginary of Dali into a few staggering lines. Yet we don’t get a collection of Beefheart readings until 1993, when he appeared in a short documentary by Anton Corbijn called Some Yo Yo Stuff.
You can watch that film at the top of the post, and in the videos below it, hear Van Vliet read poems and song lyrics in recordings from his time with Corbijn. Both in the film and in the readings, it is evident that the multiple sclerosis that killed Beefheart in 2010 had rendered speech difficult for him. But with patient listening, we hear that his sparkling wit and absurdist genius remained at full strength, as in another, long 1993 interview with Dutch radio host Co De Kloet.
Beefheart earned a reputation as an autocratic-yet-capricious bandleader (recording a tongue-in-cheek spoken word piece on the subject in earlier years). But in interviews, he came across as humble, sweet-tempered, and gentle, and as an artist whose work was an authentic outgrowth of his personality. These qualities shine through in even the goofiest, most out-there poems and lyrics.
Further up, hear Beefheart read the poems and songs “Fallin’ Ditch,” “The Tired Plain,” “Skeleton Makes Good,” “Safe Sex Drill,” and “Gill,” and in the playlist below, he reads all of those plus his poem, “Tulip,” a short modernist gem reminiscent of both Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams:
It could be a tremendous black upside-down tulip it could be a black fishes’ tail it could be a day, artistically crimped and buoyant in its taped together way
I first came to know the work of Cormac McCarthy through the 1973 novel Child of God, a portrait of a terrifyingly alienated loner who becomes a serial killer. The book so immerses readers in the dank, claustrophobic world of its protagonist, Lester Ballard, that one can almost smell the dirt and rotting flesh. Next, I read Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s psychedelically brutal epic about a mercenary band of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century Southwest. In McCarthy’s avalanche of prose—which lacks commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, and most every other mark of punctuation—long passages of grim death and carnage become hallucinatory trance-inducing incantations.
It’s never a good idea to identify an author too closely with their fiction; the most disturbingly effective works of horror and madness have very often been designed by writers of the highest emotional sensitivity and critical intelligence. This is certainly the case with McCarthy, whose work plumbs the deepest existential abysses. Nevertheless, I harbored certain anxious expectations of him, unsure if he was a writer I’d ever actually want to meet. So like many others, I was more than a little puzzled by McCarthy’s decision to give his first and only TV interview in 2007 on Oprah Winfrey’s wildly popular platform.
But among the many things we learned from their pleasant conversation is that McCarthy doesn’t care much for literary society. He doesn’t like writers so much as he loves writing and thinking, of all kinds. He spends most of his time with scientists, keeping—as we noted in a post last week—an office at a think tank called the Santa Fe Institute and doing most of his writing there on a noisy old typewriter. While developing relationships with physicists, McCarthy took an interest in their writing, and volunteered to copy-edit several scientific books. He overhauled the prose in physicist Lawrence Krauss’s Quantum Man, a biography of Richard Feynman, promising, says Krauss, that he “could excise all the exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.”
In 2005, McCarthy read the manuscript of the Harvard physicist Lisa Randall’s first book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions. He “gave it a good copy-edit,” Randall said, and “really smoothed the prose.” Later he did the same for her second book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door. During that experience, she notes, “we had some nice conversations about the material. In fact, I saw a quote where he used a physics example I had given in response to a question about truth and beauty.”
Perhaps McCarthy sees this avocation as a challenge and an opportunity to learn. Perhaps he’s also doing research for his own work. His latest project, The Passenger, includes a character who is a Los Alamos physicist. But what about another, surprisingly out-of-the-blue editorial job he took on in 1996? Before he applied his austerities to Krauss and Randall’s work, he received an article from theoretical economist and friend W. Brian Arthur. The piece, scheduled to be published in the Harvard Business Review, was titled “Increasing Returns and the New World of Business.”
After mailing McCarthy the article, Arthur called and asked him how he liked it. “There was a silence on the line,” he tells Rick Tetzeli in an interview for Fast Company, “and then he said, ‘Would you be interested in some editorial help on that?’” The two spent four hours going over the writing. “Let’s say the piece was better for all the hours Cormac and I spent poring over every sentence,” Arthur says, noting that his editor called in a “slight panic” after hearing about the collaboration. You can read the full article here. It’s “a lot punchier and more sharply worded than you might expect, given its subject matter,” writes The Onion’s A.V. Club. It also contains a lot more punctuation than we might expect, given its copy-editor’s philosophy.
“Increasing Returns and the New World of Business” became one of Harvard Business Review’s “most influential articles” Tetzeli writes. “Even now, the theory of increasing returns is as important as ever: it’s at the heart of the success of companies such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb.” Did McCarthy’s encounter with Arthur’s theory appear in his later fiction? Who knows. Perhaps where Arthur’s vision of economic growth predicted the massive tech giants to come, McCarthy’s keen mind saw the ever-increasing profits of business savvy drug cartels like those in No Country for Old Men and his Ridley Scott collaboration The Counselor.
The distorted sounds of helicopter blades. The drunken punch that shatters the mirror. The “Ride of the Valkyries” attack. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” The slaughtering of the water buffalo. “The horror… the horror.” In the nearly three-hour runtime of its original cut, Apocalypse Now delivers these and many more of the most vivid cinematic moments of the 1970s, the era of “New Hollywood”—when young auteurs like its director Francis Ford Coppola swept in and demolished the boundaries of mainstream American cinema—and that of the Vietnam War the film depicts as well.
Yet for all its artistic and cultural impact, the film hasn’t received quite as much scrutiny as you might imagine. Or at least that’s how it looked to professional cinephile Lewis Bond, known for his work on Channel Criswell, when he first took stock of Apocalypse Now’s analytical video essay landscape.
Discussions of Coppola’s Vietnam masterpiece tend to focus on its legendarily arduous production and the one million feet of film famously shot during it, a precedent perhaps set by the 1991 behind-the-scenes documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
These appraisals shy away from one seemingly important question in particular: what is the movieabout? On one level, the answer to that question comes easily: a modern adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness,Apocalypse Now transplants and transforms Conrad’s story of a journey up the Congo River to the stronghold of an ivory trader into the context of 1969 Vietnam. The river journey remains, now led by a United States Army captain charged with the “termination with extreme prejudice” of an Army Special Forces colonel gone rogue, and probably insane, in Cambodia, surrounded by ex-soldiers and natives who reportedly worship him as a “demigod.”
Bond references the standard interpretation of Apocalypse Now’s river journey as “a metaphor for descent into madness,” but in his two-part, hour-long video essay analyzing the themes of the film, he posits “a more appropriate description of the river” as “a reflection of the characters’ inner journey, showing us the indoctrination of evil.” Along the way, Coppola and his collaborators offer a singular cinematic experience about not one thing but many: “It’s about the destruction of people’s morals. It’s about the way America operated during Vietnam as well as the confused values that America pushed upon the world. It’s about war. It’s about people” — and everything else before which our interpretive instincts ultimately fall powerless.
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