My friends fault me for my lack of spontaneity. If they only knew I'm like this for the good of the country. Jonathan Jones has this to say about the Wild New World:
'Improvisation is America's art, its self-expression - and its disaster.'
'Improvisation, for Mark Twain and Louis Armstrong, was the free American way. Parker and Pollock took this seriously, and tried, in a society at once conformist, racist and unequal, to find America's lost music - the music that only ever existed in late-night smoky rooms for a few minutes, the music the Constitution promised. In place of the phoney freedom for which the Rosenbergs were executed, the new American art of the late 1940s imagined a bodily, sensual, shared freedom.'
'From Twain to Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock and Marlon Brando, American artists took freedom, that word America touted so emptily, and tried to find a meaning in it; an American ethic of self-expression.
Apocalypse Now is the death of this illusion. There is plenty of freedom here - nothing else except freedom, and self-expression. Americans fire from helicopters for fun. The war is a riff. When a marksman shoots into the night to the sound of an electric guitar solo, it could so easily be a sax. At the end of the river, Marlon Brando improvises a monster so disorganised that some feel the performance itself is nothing but chaos. He lisps, "Have you ever considered any true freedoms?"'
At the end of the river, Marlon Brando improvises a monster so disorganised that some feel the performance itself is nothing but chaos.
I think that "some" may have included the director at the time.
Posted by: Alan Allport at December 13, 2004 10:41 AMApocalypse Now is overrated. Brando's rubbish in it- had no idea what the film was about and refused to read Conrad, also the fattest super soldier ever. Big American Kids Being Portentous in the Jungle. So appropriate that Jim Morrison is on the soundtrack, it is a film made to that aesthetic. When, I ask myself, is some Camus-toting Hollywood pseud going to do the same for Eye-rack?
Posted by: ROBBIE at December 14, 2004 03:47 AM