In the middle of darkness

In the middle of darkness (original title: Heart off Darkness ) is a long news of Joseph Conrad, published in serial in a review in 1899, then within a collection of three accounts, Youth ( youth ), in 1902.

She reports the voyage of a young British commercial naval officer which goes up the course of a river in the middle of the Black Africa. Engaged by a Belgian company, it must restore commercial links with the director of a counter in the middle of the jungle, Kurtz, very effective collector of ivory, but which one is without news. The tour is presented in the form of a slow distance of civilization and humanity towards the most wild aspects and most primitive of the man, through the progressive discovery of attractive and very dark personality of Kurtz.

Adaptations and transpositions

The film Apocalypse Now of Coppola transposes the account in the context of the Guerre of Vietnam. The screen (a boat going up a river in the middle of the jungle) and the topics approached (the “dehumanization” of the man as it goes up the river) are identical.

In 1987, in his novel the depths of the ground , the writer Robert Silverberg is inspired some and homage returns to him by tranposant it in the kind of science fiction.

Television gave an adaptation more faithful to the text in 1994 by Nicolas Roeg (see Heart off Darkness ) with Tim Roth, John Malkovich, Isaach de Bankolé and James Fox.

" Aguirre, the anger of God " , a film of the German realizer of Werner Herzog left in 1972 also has a screen close, but transposed in the Latin America of the Conquistador S.

It is also evoked in the film King Kong (2005) of Peter Jackson.

It is used finally as red wire with documentary of Thierry Michel devoted to the river Congo, Congo River (2006). The realizer goes up the river until his source and enters gradually in the middle of a country in search of rebuilding.

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