War is cel

Ari Folman uses an unconventional format to uneart repressed memories in Waltz with Bashir.

It’s no surprise to learn that Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir—an excruciatingly personal, cliché-busting memoir-cum-investigative reconstruction of his experience in Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War—encountered early resistance.
“Huge resistance,” a media-weary Folman corrects in a nondescript Upper East Side hotel room tailor-made for assembly-line interviews. “From the film establishment, not from the audience.”

What’s perplexing is that the skepticism wasn’t based on the film’s examination of a particularly shameful episode in Israel’s history, in which the country’s army was complicit in the slaughter of 3,000 Palestinians in Beirut by Lebanese Christian militiamen. Instead, it was that Folman chose to depict his battlefield recollections in animated form.

“In Israel, we don’t have private funding, so I had to go to TV funds, film funds and Europe as well,” the director, 46, recalls. “They said, ‘If it’s a documentary, it can’t be animated; if it’s animated, it can’t be a documentary, so decide what you’re going to do.’ It was a stupid declaration, the term animated documentary. If I were to do [the film] tomorrow, I’d never
say those words. It threatens people.”

Indeed, Tal Gadon and Gali Edelbaum’s fluid, pensive animation gives Waltz with Bashir a dreamy matter-of-factness that few effects-laden war films achieve. “Most directors, when they’re on the set, fall in love with the idea of making a war movie,” Folman says. “Think about it: You’re somewhere in Southeast Asia, you say, ‘Action!’ and, like, five helicopters come in and bomb the forest. So you relive the generality you’re dealing with in the film.”

Folman says this approach had no influence over his war story: “It’s more about books—Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five and William Saroyan’s The Adventures of Wesley Jackson. They look at war not in a glorifying way, but take the cynical aspect and the ironic point of view and play with it. I wanted to do that.” The decentralized, fragmentary quality of those narratives is a good analogue to Folman’s predicament in the film: Unable to remember his part as a young soldier in the Sabra and Shatila refugee-camp massacres, he seeks out and interviews his military comrades in an attempt to recapture the truth. These painfully frank sequences, which flow into Folman’s distorted memories of Lebanon to form the movie’s hypnotic pattern, feature the actual soldiers he served with (and their real voices)—a pair of notable exceptions played by actors notwithstanding. “One of them didn’t want the guys he works with to know he’s a compulsive joint smoker,” Folman reveals, “and the other guy’s wife told him that she didn’t think people should know he was in Beirut.” (Ironically, of all the interviewees, Folman had remained friends with only these two.)

This mix of the real with the fabricated is fitting, though, as Waltz with Bashir ultimately exposes war as an enemy of truth and memory and an eraser of histories both personal and collective. Perhaps that explains the varied responses to his work that Folman has encountered. “I’ve been traveling with the film for seven months, and the reaction to it reflects each country’s history,” he says. “The Germans were just obsessed with the massacre; they didn’t see that it was animated. In France, it was only culpability—guilt feelings, because of Algeria. But that didn’t have anything to do with me—they didn’t see me. They saw themselves.”

A few critics have questioned whether the film itself doesn’t succumb to a similar kind of tunnel vision. “The [Lebanon] war was a mess from beginning to inconclusive end,” says Asher Kaufman, an Israeli scholar at the University of Notre Dame who also served in Lebanon. “But most Israelis would like to silence the other parts of this war. It’s easier to focus on Sabra and Shatila—Israeli soldiers did not participate in the killing, and the Kahan Commission that investigated the massacres exonerated Israel, all in all.”

Historical amnesia or not, such single-mindedness characterizes Waltz with Bashir’s climactic, minute-long switch to video footage. This jarring shift, Folman says, “puts the film into proportion. It says, Yes, this is a journey into someone’s mind, someone’s subconscious. But in the end, it’s not about memories and traveling in dreams. Three thousand people dead, most of them kids, women, old people, all of them unprotected. This is what it looks like.”

As for providing context beyond that, Folman asks, “This is it, why do you need more? What I feel about it, what I think about it? Who cares? That’s a different story.”

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