It Is The Means That Means

An exploration concerning human culture, if expected to shed light on people's mind, seen from most of the studies that could hopefully get into some proposition, can gain its success to some degree on the question whether it is possible to find new and alternative ways to replace their old counterparts, enabling the reproduction of new knowledge, new notions and new theories. It is also the same with the research of film, especially on its relationship with other arts. However, deficiencies present themselves in the field in that the cinematic version of fiction has always been studied in accordance with other criteria than can be found in the field of movies, falling into a dilemma that puts it into some area other than its own, while film is flourishing as an industry. The judgment thus made means no help to the recognition of the art as an independent genre; rather it to a great degree impairs the aesthetic appreciation and theoretical localization of both fiction and film. The second kind of deficiencies can be found in a given view which, while taking film as originated in the West, always sees the art from the perspective of some given Western theory with the classical Chinese aesthetics neglected and ignored. Consequently, it seems that not only film is defined as a product originated from the West; the theoretic exploration of the art is also conceived in the same way. It is against such a background that this thesis chooses the novel-film adaptation as its subject. Different from the studies popular nowadays, the paper is intended to probe into the adaptation of Apocalypse Now based on Heart of Darkness, reflecting on its process of creative transformation and that of its aesthetic appreciation, in light of the classical Chinese aesthetics. It is also intended to reveal the aesthetics as possibly having a unique interpretative power and function in the artistic evaluation and judgment on film, a new techologicalized medium, indicating primarily that the Eastern and Eastern cultures can be promoted to a new stage with their complementarities. Apocalypse Now is a film conducted by Coppola, a famous American director, who adapts it from the novel Heart of Darkness written by Conrad, a British novelist. People have to face the work squarely, a war movie that is worthy of the name of a masterpiece, with the ingenious skills displayed in its adaptation, the important place it has occupied in the history of American movie history, its penetrating exploration of war, the abundant awards it has won, the sensation it has aroused in the audience worldwide and the immensely great influence upon Americans especially after 9.11. This paper thus defines the work as a kind of artistic sublimation, which, manifests itself in the fact that in the film you can clearly spot the transmigration of the "soul" of the original novel, with a fresh and new world reproduced in correspondence to the artistic space of the latter. In the process of its discussion, the paper defines the adaptation as a "creative transformation"(转化), an ideal and a criterion in cinematicalization. In contrast, trans-formation(转换)in the general sense tends to stick to the form of the original work, thus possibly failing in having not transformed itself from the latter and tendentiously confining itself within the form, to the result that it is to some extent represented in an imitation of the original. It is in this sense that the work done in such a way cannot find the means to overcome the bounds and boundaries between different genres of art, driving the rewriting into a step-by-step copy, relying too much on the structure of the original and not abiding by the basic rules of artistic creation, with the product unable to reach its destination of sublimation ultimately. But in terms of transformation as such, the classical Chinese aesthetics can provide a highly valuable resource. This paper therefore will find theoretical support in it in regard to Coppola's adaptation. The whole article is divided into eight parts: a general introduction,...