Film and Literature

Film and Literature : Joseph Conrad 's Heart of Darkness

and Francis Ford Coppola 's Apocalypse Now

Introduction

Literature and film feed at the same breast , considering the affinities between them . Since its very beginning , Hollywood has used works of fiction as source material for films . One of the most discussed adaptations is Francis Ford Coppola 's Film Apocalypse Now (1979 ) based on Joseph Conrad 's novel Heart of Darkness (1902 . This compares and contrasts these works of art , arguing that while there are obvious differences , the film generally general remains true

to the core meaning of the novel . One can say that Coppola 's film is a thematic and structural analogue to Conrad 's novel

Differences

On the surface it seems that Apocalypse Now deviates largely Heart of Darkness . The differences can be seen in settings , events , characters and other snippets of information such as quoted lines and strange actions of the major characters . The settings of the two stories are different and written in different periods of time . The setting of Conrad 's late nineteenth century novel is the Belgian Congo in the 1890s . By contrast , Coppola 's 1979 film takes place in Southeast Asia in the 1960s during the Vietnam War . In addition , the novel centers on Charles Marlow , a British sailor employed by a European trading company as captain of one of their steamboats , whereas the film focuses on an American army officer , Benjamin Willard

Another major difference is that the ivory traders are in the...