Abstract
Inspired by the novel written by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) and influenced by the film by Nicholas Ray Wind across the Everglades (1958), Francis-Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) reveals a grandiose imagery that conveys a lavish symbolic charge. Vast opera of death and destruction, the super production denounces the corruptive dementia of the Vietnam atrocities through the spectacle of a nightmare of history. Insofar as it relates the degenerative adventure of a soldier fatally led astray by the lunacy of war, the movie offers a both explicit and implicit panorama of an American trauma. In accordance with the thematic of the course, that is to say the complex interrelationship between the cinema, memory and history, the problematic hereafter surveyed will look into the mirror structure that governs the link between historical cinema and cultural identity.
