Restrictive media and focused attention (reflection on 'Hearts of Darkness')

Last night I watched, for the first time, 'Hearts of Darkness', the documentary made during the filming of Francis Ford Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now' (1979). The documentary was directed and steered largely by Francis's partner, Eleanor Coppola, who captures behind-the-scenes planning, struggles, catastrophe, insight and talking-heads interviews with cast and crew filmed some years later.

Side note: while I haven't seen Apocalypse Now for a good few years (the Redux version is pretty long and not something I have the time to watch over and over again, too often), but the film definitely left an impression on me - in particular the cinematography that captures focus drifting between inner space and outer space like the fog blowing over the river in the movie, revealing sketches, moments, and a different view of 'the real' throughout. If you haven't had the experience of watching this movie before, I'd definitely recommend trying to carve out those few hours and sit down and jump in.

One little detail that jumped out at me in 'Hearts of Darkness' that got me thinking this morning was watching Francis grapple with the script throughout the production process. While the crew were working largely from an already-existing script, they struggled with the structure of the original scripted ending, and also introduced some other scenes along the way. The filmmaking process looked like a real journey, and as the script was being modified and added to, the writing and re-writing was happening concurrently with the production, also drawing in improvisation and input from the cast and crew throughout the process - a method which at times stretched the limits.

I got thinking about Francis with the typewriter you see him working from on location in the Philippines, sheets of paper cluttered around and new pages emerging from the machine as he tapped away and captured new moments in the script that unfolded from this process. In hindsight, against the abundant flex of the personal computer and what it can achieve (one minute a home cinema, the next a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database, a news reader, a comment poster, etc.), it looks like such great joy for a device to have such clear limits and boundaries. Paper goes in, words get typed, paper comes out: no new tabs, no other function to steal the user's attention and draw focus away from the activity of writing.

As someone who *attempts* to write creatively from time to time, and does so largely using a personal computer for reasons of convenience (easy editing, backups, portability, etc), I'd always thought that using a typewriter in the age of the personal computer was a kind-of false asceticism - more like an embellishment placed on top of the act of writing to, in effect, distract, but now that I see clearly the beauty of what that 'restriction' and restricted focus can offer, I can really see the appeal. And while it's true that the user today can carve out those restrictions through self-discipline, I think there's something to be said for the imposed limitations of the technical object; a technicity of particular design rather than a the vast flex of the contemporary digital interface.

Tags: #heartsofdarkness #francisfordcoppola #apocalypsenow #writing #digitality #focus