Coppolas Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered

Abstract

In the fall of 1994, as an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I wrote a term paper for Anna Brusutti's "Introduction to Cinema" class. The paper was called "Editing, mise-enscene, and cinematography in a selected sequence from Apocalypse Now" Although the reader's general comments were quite sympathetic to my rather flagrandy formalist analysis of the "Suzie Q" segment, he did point out that I had, to quote a remark scribbled in the margin on the last page, "glossed over... some of the historical imagery." Little did I know then that the question of history in relation to Apocalypse Now would resurface almost a decade later in a slighdy more ceremonial context. Given the chance, am I going to skirt the issue once again? Can we felicitously talk about a form of historical imagery that has not been sublated by what Thomas Elsaesser in his book on Weimar cinema calls the historical imaginary?