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Waltz with Bashir (2008)

Director: Ari Folman

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9 reviews

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From Time Out London

‘Memory is dynamic… It’s alive.’ This animated documentary, for which Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman’s wizard colleague, the artist David Polonsky, dazzlingly illustrates talking-head recollections and reconstructions of a past war, comes across like a therapy session made vivid with bizarre, expressionist colours and the jolty, episodic mood of remembrance.

The film is a cathartic trip down memory lane for Folman – only he doesn’t know where he’s going. As a young soldier, he took part in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and was in Beirut when the Lebanese Christian militia known as Phalangists murdered 800 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps – perhaps with the approval of the Israeli army. It was a massacre that caused Ariel Sharon, Israel’s defence minister, to resign from his post when an inquiry found him indirectly responsible for the deaths.

Then and now, Folman puts himself centre-stage – which means he’s always dancing on the edge of self-indulgence. It’s a game that neatly frames a ramshackle tale but also grates the more it’s emphasised. Now in his forties, this urbane, bearded character visits other lucid contemporaries to hear their versions of the experience they shared. There’s a guy living in Holland who’s made a fortune selling falafel. There’s the war correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai, who marched gung-ho, John Simpson-like into Beirut. There’s a guy whose talk is oddly associative: he talks of the patchouli scent, a sort of aftershave, that everyone was wearing at the time of the war. For him, like Folman’s inability to remember much at all, it’s the lasting gift of the conflict.

Presumably Folman filmed all these interviews, later animating them with the events of which each interviewee speaks, so blurring the line between fact and fiction and stressing the power and failings of memory. But take away the unusual form of illustration and the model is that of a traditional, flashback-driven, dramatised doc. In fact, the animation is the film’s strength: it’s revelatory, from the portrayal of dreamy, gold-and-black-coloured episodes of soldiers bathing in the sea with distant flares lighting up Beirut to more realist depictions of death such as when a soldier driving a tank suddenly takes a fatal bullet.

It’s this sort of erratic, ground-level experience that Folman focuses on the most; even the facts of the massacre take a back seat. He wants to show war as ridiculous, and his concern for the horrors and absurdities of battle feels fresh and affecting.

And yet, despite the grim subject, this is a beautiful film. A paradox? Only if you expect coherence – and ‘Waltz with Bashir’ is anything but coherent, and pointedly so. It’s recollection refracted – and then some. It’s messy and unusual, not always gratifying, sometimes frustrating, always compelling.

Author: Dave Calhoun 2008-10-01 18:22:19

Time Out London Issue 1996, Nov 20-26, 2008

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User reviews of this film

Technoguy said...

Posted on May 25 2009 18:37 The individual comrades(20 years on) asked to divulge their memories of the
invasion of Lebanon 20 years before with particular regard to where people were or
what they remembered about the Shabra and Shantilla massacre to Ari Folman
who has memory block, is an exercise aided by his psychologist friend Ori and
a psychiatrist. The nation of Israel has suppressed memories of a terrible event
to survive and has to collectively face it’s demons. Boaz has a nightmare of being chased by a pack of rabid dogs, the26 he killed to aid the invasion of villages.
Folman the writer-director of this memoir has through interview and newsreel
footage translated by story board into the graphic animation, Waltz with Bashir.
This is a kind of subjective documentary based on reconstruction, Rashomon-like
into painful memories buried beneath hallucinations, nightmares, illusions, fear
and guilt. Did the massacre never happen? Happy memories of crossing the border
into beautiful scenery and singing are mixed with painful traumas of transporting
bodies back to base camp. Cami’s defence mechanism was to rest on a giant naked
woman swimming in his dream of macho sexuality. Folman’s recurring hallucination
is swimming ashore with two other soldiers in Lebanon, the sky a sulphurous yellow,
suggesting some buried unnamed guilt. The safety Ronny feels in a tank is offset
by seeing his commander killed beside him and the explosion followed by the men’s escape from the tank, running across sniper-filled open ground, everybody being killed apart from himself, who crawls to the sea at nightfall and swims south, where
he rejoins the regiment that deserted him. Shmuel Frenkel , once a corporal, tells
how patchouli oil he used helped his men in the dark. He recalls their search for
terrorists in sun-dappled woodlands and the boy with an RPG. Through dissociation
of sensibility some men see war through an imaginary camera as a daytrip,
becoming traumatised when the ‘camera’ breaks. As they enter Beirut the army
gets pinned down by rapid fire from tower blocks and RPGs. Frenkel seizes a MAG
gun and dances around in a trance beneath posters of Bashir shooting wildly. The
slaughter camp is 200 yards away and Cami thinks that seeing Bashir posters everywhere and him idolised like the man who would be king, only for him to be
murdered , is like an LSD trip. Folman’s deep-rooted obsession to find out what
really happened stems from his knowledge through his parents of the Holocaust
and those ‘other camps’. Ron Ben-Yisha the journalist picks up from a corporal
that a massacre is going on, not something he’s witnessed himself only heard from
others. Similar stories are picked up by soldiers who witness some killings of
families, who report what they can to corporals who reply” it’s under control”.
Sharon too, when informed takes it phlegmatically. The command betray an
element of collusion that the simple grunts like Folman and comrades don’t
understand until it’s too late. While guarding the camps the IDF have given cover
to the Christian Phalangist Militia to enter the camps and ‘purge’ it of PLO men.
These elements had been vacated 2 weeks before. Settlements are reduced to rubble
and mass killings of women, children, old people and young men, all civilians,
has occurred to avenge the death of Gemayel Bashir. This animation is done
in the spirit of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5 with the graphic novels of Succo
in mind. Due to post-traumatic stress we don’t get to the massacre itself until
last when even the animation is peeled away to reveal objective truth. This gives
the reality a supercharged quality no animation can convey. The only criticism
is that the Palestinians remain a shadowy unindividuated mass, alive in death.
But with Persepolis too we see the new form of documentary animation arise.

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Terry said...

Posted on Feb 08 2009 14:40 A beautiful film that moved me and gave me fresh hope for the creative force of film making as opposed to the film assembly lines of Hollywood.

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John said...

Posted on Feb 01 2009 01:56 Absolutely incredible film. Portrays the topic with sensitivity and insight without making a blunt judgement.
The soundtrack by Max Richter is also beautiful.

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Sam said...

Posted on Jan 12 2009 22:27 Lives up to the hype.

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Artemis G. said...

Posted on Jan 12 2009 14:12 A riveting insight into the mind of an unwitting executioner plagued by selective amnesia. The overkill of blood-splattered war dramas has probably made many viewers practically nonreactive to scenes of ghastly destruction; here, however, the unlikely choice of medium - animation - cleverly grips the attention of even seasoned war-film viewers. At the same time, the choice of animation embodies (or rather illustrates) the director's subconscious detachment from the harrowing experience of fighting in Lebanon. The decision to conclude the film with actual newsreels footage suggests that his trip into memory brought him near reality, eliminating that sense of cognitive distance. Having said that, this autobiographical documentary treads carefully around the ethical questions its director is troubled by: political opinions are never aired, war is never critisised, and the plight of the Palestinians is viewed at best from the distance of newsreels - the director hasn't dared face his subject through his own lens. Watching the film I often felt as though I were eavesdropping on an analysand talking to his therapist, and the focus, as in real-life psychotherapy, was on the subject, the 'me', the 'ego'. An original, candid, and compelling confession, which nevertheless to my mind does not achieve closure.

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Debbie Ferrer said...

Posted on Jan 03 2009 13:43 Excellent and very original.

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jane said...

Posted on Dec 12 2008 15:31 fascinating, creative and very moving

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Chris Beney said...

Posted on Dec 06 2008 15:36 The animation is terrific, the dogs, the sea. It would have been absurd for middle aged men to be remembering by re-enacting. But by filming them and then rejuvenating them by animation it became real. The short but relevant bit of porn could have been shorter without loss, maybe that's just me. The blending in of real footage at the end was seamless and wholly effective. History rewrites facts but the guilt in broad terms was clear, I would have liked some reference to formal inquiries and their findings, but that might have spoiled the overall flow of the film and the personal and human nature of its story. Do not miss seeing it.

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Madison said...

Posted on Nov 27 2008 13:38 Mesmerizing and moving

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