Publish at November 26 2025 Updated November 26 2025
In 1979, the seventh art saw the appearance of what was to become a new classic: Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now". The film, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, tells the story of American soldiers in Vietnam who must travel up a river to stop a former colonel, Kurtz, who has gone completely mad and established a reign of terror in the heart of the jungle. This aspect is often forgotten, but this is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel "In the Heart of Darkness".
In the novel, ipso facto, the backdrop is not the Indochina War, but rather Belgian colonial atrocities in the Congo. The author had been there almost 10 years before the book came out, and had been deeply shocked by the treatment of the local populations, some of them decimated in part by megalomaniac individuals. So he created this story of a young British officer who travels up a river to arrest Kurtz, a renowned ivory trader who has lost his mind.
The literary work also came out at the same time as a scandal in France involving two soldiers, Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine, who massacred regional groups along the Niger River and even shot French soldiers who had come to apprehend them. They were eventually executed by their own men after a mutiny. Their behavior was explained by the media as "a tropical disease", to avoid amplifying the anger already present in the Dreyfuss affair.
Running time: 4min16
Image : Metaphorical representation of the colonization of the Congo - Copilot
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