Israel's dance with death

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

A new film category has arrived: the animated documentary.

Waltz with Bashir is about director Ari Folman's search for the missing memories of his experiences in the Israeli army in Lebanon in the early 1980s.

He talks to therapists, friends and army colleagues. Seven of the interviews, he says, are the actual people, interviewed in a sound studio. The other two are played by actors, but their testimonies are real.

What the viewer sees is 2,300 illustrations that have been turned into animation.

“I was not happy to do it in real life video,” he says. “How would that have looked? A middle-aged man being interviewed against a background, telling stories that happened 25 years ago, without any archival footage to support them. That would have been SO BORING. Then I figured out it could be done only in animation with fantastic drawings. War is so surreal, and memory is so tricky that I thought I’d better go all along the memory journey with the help of very fine illustrators.”

Watching the film, at first I was distracted by the eyes, particularly the way they blinked. Then I was drawn in. By the end, animation seemed the only way to convey Folman’s search.

“A journey trying to figure out a traumatic memory from the past is a commitment to long-term therapy”, Folman says. “My therapy lasted as long as the production of Waltz with Bashir: four years.

“There was a shift from dark depression as a result of things discovered to being in euphoria over the film finally being in production… If I was the type of guy who believes in the cult of psychotherapy, I’d swear the film had done miracles to my personality. But due to previous experience, I’d say the filmmaking part was good, but the therapy aspect sucked.”

The gradual recapturing of memory and the participants’ own stories make a fascinating film. The animation makes it unusual and compelling. The portrayal of conflict makes it an important anti-war document (“I’ve come to one conclusion: war is so useless that it’s unbelievable”, says Folman. “It’s nothing like you’ve seen in American movies. No glam, no glory. Just very young men going nowhere, shooting at no-one they know, getting shot by no-one they know, then going home and trying to forget.”)

But it also stands as evidence, and as a memorial, to the terrible events of the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, a vast war crime in which Christian Phalangist militias killed an estimated 3,000 Palestinians.

The exact extent of Israeli participation is not known, though Israel’s Defence Minister Ariel Sharon was dismissed after an Israeli inquiry found him guilty of failing to stop the massacre.

Asked about Israel’s involvement, Folman has said: “One thing for sure is that the Christian Phalangist militiamen were fully responsible for the massacre. The Israeli soldiers had nothing to do with it. As for the Israeli government, only they know the extent of their responsibility. Only they know if they were informed or not in advance about the oncoming violent revenge [for the assassination of Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayal].”

One possible criticism: in the final analysis, the film doesn't follow up the implications of the fascinating issue of suppressed memories (presumably because Folman thinks it's obvious why some memories are pushed aside), and instead focuses on revealing the absurdities and horrors of war.

Nevertheless, this is an outstanding film about appalling events.