"THE HORROR": GUERRA, MEMÓRIA E TRAUMA NA OBRA CINEMATOGRÁFICA APOCALYPSE NOW, DE FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA (1979)

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the film Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) both as a historical source and as a fictional narrative strongly anchored in reality, concerning U.S. participation in the Vietnam War (1955–1975), with emphasis on home front tensions and the historicity of war trauma. Rather than treating the film as a transparent mirror of the conflict, the research reads it as a public elaboration of the experiences, justifications, and impasses that marked the war and its reception in the United States. The approach draws on Film and History and on the History of the Present, combining formal analysis (editing, sound design, mise-en-scène) with the contextualization of the film’s production and reception in its time. Beyond the main source, the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) is mobilized to discuss the production’s collapse as part of the film’s historical meaning. The study argues that the film, as a cultural form that selects, intensifies, and organizes meanings about the past, converts the legitimacy crisis and combat experience into an ambivalent sensory memory (made of noise, repetition, cuts, saturation, and silence), exposing regimes of visibility of violence and their controversies, including in relation to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).