Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 2 (2010) 78 Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir and the Limits of Abstract Tragedy Nicholas Hetrick
Abstract (E): Drawing on scholarship on film cognition, the essay argues that Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir effectively recreates the process of recovering memories by capitalizing on the way our brains process films, and by thematizing memory. However, the film's limited contextualization of the 1982 Lebanon War and the lives of the soldiers involved and depicted limits Waltz's ability to make an effective antiwar statement. While the film's impact is not limited to viewers with knowledge of the particular politico-military conflict the film represents, it is limited by the nature and extent of its involvement with its subjects' lives before and after the war.
Abstract (F): S‟inspirant des recherches en cognition cinématographique, cet article démontre que le documentaire animé d‟Ari Folman, Valse avec Bashir, recrée vraiment le processus de la mémoire retrouvée en exploitant la manière dont notre cerveau traite les images filmiques, puis en thématisant la mémoire. Toutefois, la contextualisation très partielle de la guerre du Liban de 1982 et les vies des soldats impliqués et représentés dans le film limitent les possibilités de Valse avec Bashir de se transformer en une œuvre vraiment pacifiste. Certes, l‟impact du film n‟est pas limité aux spectateurs connaissant la situation politico-militaire décrite par le film. Ses limites sont tout autres et elles sont déterminées par la nature et l‟étendue de l‟engagement avec les vies des personnages avant et après la guerre.
keywords: documentary, animation, memory, Israel, film Article
The preponderance of reviews of Ari Folman‟s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (2009) begin by remarking, whether briefly or at length, on the film‟s opening sequence: a dream in which twenty-six dogs speed madly down Tel Aviv streets in pursuit of their real-life killer, Boaz Rein-Buskila. Reviewers and critics rightly point out that this scene, paired with the subsequent dialogue in which Rein-Buskila explains his dream, introduces and foregrounds Waltz‟s central concerns with memory, trauma, and responsibility. Many also note that Waltz deals most centrally with Folman‟s and his comrades‟ memories of their involvement in the 1982 Lebanon War and the massacre of Palestinian civilians by a Lebanese Christian militia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in western Beirut in September of that year. However, while this war and this massacre are the occasion for the film, Waltz with Bashir is not a historically nuanced film. It provides almost no context for the war, does not explain Palestinian or Israeli presence in Lebanon in this period, and does not situate the history of conflict in that area of the world.
Professional and casual critics alike have devoted as much attention to this fact—this psychologizing rather than historicizing war—as they have to Folman‟s decision to produce an animated rather than a conventional documentary or a fictional feature film. Writing in the journal Commentary, Hillel Halkin protests, “In the end, everything is a matter of context. The trouble with Waltz with Bashir is that it has none. It is all images and no commentary. Or rather,
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the little commentary it provides, like that of the TV news, is entirely image-driven. Folman‟s film is a child of our times, which likes its visual bites, like its sound bites, to be compact. We do not have the patience for history” (51). Likewise, writing for jewcy.com, Nathalie Rothschild says that “once the initial shock settles, the emotional response that the film provokes proves entirely unhelpful for understanding what Israel‟s bloody war in Lebanon was about, how the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut could have been allowed to happen, or what being a young combat soldier is like. The film‟s subtext—that war is futile and unglamorous—is, as Folman has said, „basic, even prosaic and banal‟” (“Post-Zionist Stress Disorder”). Such criticisms are in many ways justified, and the question of whether one can make a forceful antiwar statement apart from historico-political context is central to any assessment of this film.
At the same time, I think the question of whether this is the “right” kind of film—which is what the claims above seem to me to be answering—is the wrong question. If our job as viewers and critics is to discuss what kinds of movies ought to be made, then our conversations can only be predictable and question begging. Folman has repeatedly pointed out that he had no intention of making a film that explores multiple perspectives on the Lebanon War or Israel‟s role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. His stated aim was specifically to render the experience of the common Israeli soldier and, in doing so, to point out the felt aimlessness of armed conflict, resulting in what he views as a universal antiwar statement. Further, the very fact that the Waltz‟s opening scene establishes its rhetorical purpose of working out largely private psychological issues makes objections to its relative decontextualization unproductive. So, while Rothschild has a point about the banality of saying that war is futile, I think we should probe more deeply into the way Folman makes that point in order either to feel the force of Rothschild‟s critique or else to revise it. Otherwise, we will be forced into the problematic position of saying that one cannot make an anti-war statement without also making an historical film. Halkin similarly objects that a dehistoricized antiwar statement cannot help but be “intellectually shallow” (51). This, too, might be true—but only, I would argue, if the film fails on its own terms; that is, if it fails to make a poignant and/or forceful antiwar statement on the basis of the psychological experience of this conflict on young soldiers like Folman.
In this essay I describe Waltz with Bashir‟s engagement with (individual) memory, trauma, and responsibility. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on film cognition, I argue that Waltz with Bashir adeptly recreates the complex process of recovering memory—a recreation Folman achieves by capitalizing, whether consciously or not, on the way our brains process film, and also by thematizing memory from beginning to end. Folman‟s larger statement about the undesirability of war is wrapped up with a claim about the difficulty of simultaneously having participated in war‟s chaos and being (or at least remaining) clear-headed about its causes. However, I also argue that Folman's antiwar statement has limited impact because he does not adequately contextualize his or other former soldiers‟ experiences with respect to their lives before and after the war, especially insofar as their lives relate to their memories. In what follows, I will explain how the film‟s formal composition and its thematization of memory make Waltz with Bashir an only partially successful statement about the undesirability of war. While the film's impact is not limited to viewers with knowledge of the particular politico-military conflict the film represents, it is limited by the nature and extent of its involvement with its subjects' lives before and after the war.
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Since at least the 1980s, film scholars have been interested in cognitive approaches to film viewing—that is, the way we process films as sensory input while we watch them. Scholars following the lead of David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith have, for example, applied the psychological/linguistic notions of “codes” and “schema” to film viewing, arguing that scripts of behavior and events function roughly the same way when we watch a film as they do in our waking lives. Incorporating this and other insights from psychology and cognitive science, film scholars have moved away from previously dominant semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches to film and toward a “cognitivist” approach.
One key insight of the cognitivist program is that film influences our desires and predispositions to act not because of some subconscious (libidinal) drive, but simply because when we witness events, we imaginatively involve ourselves in them. In 1999, Gregory Currie argued that film might “change the desires I have concerning real people and events,” and that it might do so in “many ways: By making available thought-contents that were not previously available to the subject; by vividly depicting a state of affairs and thus giving specificity to a previously inchoate desire; by depicting a certain state of affairs and eliciting a pleasurable sensation from the viewer, causing the viewer to desire a state of affairs relevantly similar to the depicted one” (“Narrative Desire” 197-198). This is an early—and at that point relatively speculative—claim regarding film‟s ability to trigger “online” responses like the ones we might have if we were to experience (or observe) in real life the situations we witness in films.
More recent neuroscientific research reveals that not only do we interpret action on film approximately the same way we do in waking life, but further that we actually simulate action on screen in the areas of our brains and bodies that plan and carry out similar action in waking life. In his ambitious book Embodied Visions (2009), Torben Grodal summarizes that research, saying, “Viewers will often simulate the diegetic world from an immersed point of view through character simulation, which resembles what in ordinary language is called identification…The simulation is both mental and physical, involving both brain and body” (204). In other words, while our brains constantly register that we are watching a film and not having an actual encounter with, say, an enemy army, part of the experience and pleasure of film comes from our immersion in the experience of the action on screen.
Further, and crucially important in considering a singular film like Waltz, Grodal explores the question of objectivity and subjectivity in film with respect to viewer cognition. Intuitively, it seems that we make determinations of the objectivity or subjectivity based on the reality status of what is presented on screen—so that, for instance, we will read an animated film with an animal protagonist more “subjective” than a live-action film populated by human agents. In a certain way, this is obviously true: to watch a fictional film and then ascribe world-referential status to the events or characters in it is to misread the film. However, at the biological level, the case is more complicated, and the distinction between fact and fiction is actually separable from the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity:
[F]eelings of subjectivity and objectivity relate to the kinds of physical and mental processes that a given sequence cues. If the time-spaces presented cue a form of mental activity that is linked to the implementation of the protagonists‟ concerns in the film, or which give rise to propositions, they will elicit feelings of objectivity. But if the protagonists in the film are prevented from acting on their concerns, or if the sequence provides audiovisual information that does not cue propositions, we experience the given film sequence as subjective…Subjectivity by default offers the most obvious illustration
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of the fact that subjectivity in film depends on the circumstances of the film experience, not on the reality status of the phenomena viewed. The most common way of generating a sense of subjectivity in film, however, is to block or impede the viewer‟s ability to simulate an enactional (i.e. action-based) relationship to the world depicted on screen (Grodal 233-234).
For instance, if I were to watch twenty minutes of film footage of an empty field, I would begin to have “a sense of subjectivity”—and actually, two such senses: my mind would be free to entertain thoughts about things other than what was happening on screen; and some of those thoughts would probably have to do with what the filmmaker‟s intentions were beyond simply depicting a field. I might wonder, “What does this empty field mean?” and search for an answer more satisfying than, “This means that this is an empty field.”
In contrast, “objectivity” is triggered by filmic content “that is linked to the implementation of protagonists‟ concerns in the film” and “gives rise to propositions,” so that any depiction of human or human-like agents performing actions relevant to their goals will limit our mental capacity to generate ranging “subjective” interpretations. Other rhetorical categories such as memories, fantasies, and abstract categories are superimposed by inference and on reflection on whatever represented action (or inaction) we have already witnessed, and may lead us to qualify or revise our initial interpretation of a scene. Still, it is important that any filmic content that gives rise to propositions constrains the way we read that content. This means that a film like Waltz actually fits into what Carl Plantinga calls the “formal” category of nonfiction films rather than being, as we might suspect of an animated film about memory, “poetic.” In Plantinga‟s terms, “formal” documentaries take “a position of epistemic authority toward the film‟s projected world, and thus also toward the actual world.” Further, they pose “a clear question or a relevant and coherent set of questions” and provide “answers [for] every salient question” (Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film 110). Even though much of the material in Waltz consists of personal memories, the film asks what happened to Folman and people like him at Sabra and Shatila and what that means for people—chiefly Folman—who were there. Over the course of the film, those questions are answered: Lebanese Phalangists killed Palestinian civilians under the protection of Israeli soldiers like Folman, and this means they unwittingly helped produce the misery and grief we witness at the end of the film.
With these two insights in mind—that we mentally simulate on-screen action and that, in cognitive terms, subjectivity has less to do with reality status than with propositional content— we can begin to make some inferences about the way we process a film like Waltz with Bashir. In doing so, we discover what makes this film affectively engaging as a recreation of the experience of war.
Joining the Waltz
In order to create Waltz with Bashir, Folman put out a call for people who were in the Israeli army at the time of the Sabra and Shatila massacre and who remembered them or the events surrounding them. After interviewing several respondents, as well as a few friends and experts in topics relevant to the film‟s content and themes, he wrote a screenplay. In order to produce the film, interviewees came to a sound studio where their interviews, scripted based on the initial conversations, were recorded. Subsequently, the small team of animators created “animatics”— essentially moving storyboards consisting of simple animation—before creating the actual
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animation for the film. For scenes taking place during the war, the process was the same, frequently involving actors and interviewees acting out scenes in the sound studio before they were storyboarded and animated as if taking place in their original locales. The scenes depicted in the film as interviewees recall their experiences are not, then, based on actual footage of their experiences, but rather on the reconstruction of those experiences from the interviewees‟ memories of them.
Folman has explained that the decision to create an animated documentary was partly born of a desire to reach a certain audience: “younger…teenager[s], before [they] think that it‟s really cool to go to war…No teenager who sees this film thinks that, „OK, war is terrible, but I want to be the guy in the movie.‟ Nobody wants to be the guy in this film” (“Q&A with Ari Folman”). In fact, the decision to make an animated film may be appropriate not only contextually—as in, a younger audience will be more likely to watch it—but also because of the viewer response it cues. In order to demonstrate this, I turn to two important war scenes with voice over, one from Folman and one from a fellow soldier named Shmuel Frenkel.
After talking with three friends about the Lebanon War and alleging he has no memory of the period, including the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Folman has a flashback and recalls the war, starting from the first day. In the scene that depicts this event, we witness alternating shots of Folman riding in a taxi to the airport, reflecting on his recent thoughts and conversations. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1 Folman Riding in Taxi
Eventually, during a shot from outside, the reflection in the taxi window changes. The snowy landscape of Holland, where has visited a friend and fellow soldier, gives way to a Lebanon palm tree and a moving tank in which Folman stands, firing an automatic weapon into the surrounding orchards. (See Figure 2.)
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Soon the Lebanon scene takes over the screen, with shot/reverse shots of Folman as he fires his weapon and mid-range shots of the tank rolling down a seaside road. In voice over he says, “Then it happened in a taxi to Amsterdam Airport. Suddenly, all the memories came back. Not a hallucination, nor my subconscious. The first day of the war. Barely 19, I haven‟t even started shaving. We‟re driving down a road…We‟re shooting everywhere, at everything, until nightfall.”
Recall that while Folman probably really did have a flashback in a taxi to the Amsterdam Airport that triggered his memories of the Lebanon War, this experience was not filmed, just as his experience in the tank on the first day of the war was not filmed. However, by reconstructing this scene in animation after acting it out in a sound studio, Folman cues readers to simulate his experiences, especially the experience of war.
First, though, watching Folman in a taxi and then seeing the scene transition to the tank in Lebanon means that we simulate the experience of sitting in a car and looking out the window until the scene gives changes. At that point, we immerse ourselves in the experience of standing in a tank and firing a weapon. Obviously different viewers will have varying degrees of real-world (in)experience riding in a car or firing a weapon, but the schemas for such behaviors are available to nearly all viewers, even those who have only ever pretended to fire a weapon. So, the baseline viewer experience of this scene consists in simulating first the experience of riding in a car, and then of seeing a landscape outside the car, and then standing in a tank firing a weapon. In the same way that Folman recalls his experiences with his whole body, we participate in them with ours.
Though the latter portion of the scene depicts Folman‟s memory of the war and not the experience of being there, it is actually more objective, on the account I provided earlier, than the prior portion. This is because for the first twenty seconds of the scene, there is no voice over and no action on screen except Folman sitting in the taxi thinking. Because there are no concrete actions or “propositions” here, we are free to think about anything, from what Folman might be thinking as he rides in the car, to the technical execution of the scene‟s animation. Once the Lebanon scene takes over, though, our interpretive possibilities are restricted even as we recognize that the scene is a memory. Seeing it on screen forces us to engage the scene and enter into it in a very specific way, even if we will later revise our assessment. Here Folman has begun to make a point about memory: that remembering something anchors experience and provides at least the potential for processing that experience, even if that processing requires some
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After several more recollections of war scenes from Folman and others, a former soldier turned mixed martial artist named Shmuel Frenkel recounts an experience in a Lebanese orchard. As he puts it, “Our daily routine was this: Get up every morning, prepare breakfast on those frying pans, potted beef and eggs…Take a quick swim, back into uniform, then go after some terrorists.” During this voice over, we witness Israeli higher-ups like then-defense minister Ariel Sharon having breakfast as they make decisions regarding what ground troops will do that day. We then see a soldier eating a modest breakfast on a beach the army has recently taken. As Frenkel says, “…go after some terrorists,” the soldier receives his orders over the phone and stands up. Once he is fully upright, the scenery has changed, and the soldier is now in uniform, in an orchard, along with other soldiers. They are cautiously moving deeper into the orchard, armed; the soundtrack is not diegetic or voice over narration, but a piano version of Bach‟s Harpsichord Concerto No. 5. A few quick cuts reveal two adolescent boys darting behind trees, in the shadows, holding rocket launchers. One of the boys enters a clearing and fires an RPG, striking an Israeli tank. The soldiers drop to the ground and crawl forward. When another boy sets his feet to fire, the soldiers open fire, killing him. The scene ends with a pan-out from the boy‟s corpse lying in the orchard with the rocket launcher at his side.
In this scene, like the earlier scene summoned by Folman‟s flashback, the actions on-screen are concrete and propositional: these things happened, in this order. We know Frenkel is reporting events this way, especially because in the middle of the orchard scene, the music stops abruptly and the visual track cuts to an older Frenkel telling Folman the story before the orchard scene resumes. Rather than simply pairing verbal descriptions with footage of the men in the sound studio, the images on screen—paired with either unrelated sound or voice over narration that confirms the veracity of what we are witnessing—facilitate viewer simulation of the scenes. The effect is that viewers “participate” in the experience of being in war in a way that would not happen in another type of documentary. Further, using animation to make younger and older versions of the men look extremely similar connects the men we witness in war with the men we witness remembering and processing those experiences later. Meanwhile, neither Folman nor his interview subjects provides an explanation of the conflict in Lebanon or the reasoning behind the Israeli military presence there. Consequently, viewers know only the surreal experience of armed conflict—highlighted, for instance, by the accompaniment of the orchard scene by a Bach concerto—apart from significant understanding of what occasioned it.
Viewers with strong predispositions to filter Waltz through a particular understanding of the history of the Middle East will not likely draw these kinds of inferences about the film. I have already mentioned that Folman‟s rhetorical framing of the film (its opening sequence as an introduction to its major concerns) discourages a historicized interpretation. Throughout Waltz, the pervasive thematization of memory and its operations reveals that he is not primarily interested such viewers. As further evidence for this claim I include the following section, which traces the themes of memory and trauma through the film. The decision to trace the theme through the entire film is based on my assumption that many readers have not seen it. For those who have, it may suffice to skip this section and resume reading in the concluding section, “Simulation, Thematics, and the Worth of the Waltz.”
“Memory takes us where we need to go.”
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dream. The dream, in turn, is the product of his memory of the Lebanon War—specifically, his role in shooting dogs to prevent them from alerting Palestinians of Israeli soldiers‟ arrival in their towns, thus providing Palestinians an opportunity to hide or flee. In the dream Rein-Buskila sees a pack of the twenty-six dogs he shot pursuing him in order to avenge their deaths. His memory of the dream is accurate—that is, he remembers this vivid dream well enough to recount it in great detail. Just as important, though, his memory of the war—at least the portion consisting of him shooting dogs—is also accurate. He remembers specifically that he shot twenty-six dogs, and he can identify the dogs in the dream as the same ones he shot during the war. Additionally, Rein-Buskila remembers why he was asked to kill the dogs: as he tells Folman, “They knew I couldn‟t shoot a person.” From the film‟s first three minutes, then, we learn that there are people whose memories of the Lebanon War remain, and further that at least some Israeli soldiers who were involved in that war were hesitant to kill. As the scene continues, we see that Waltz‟s opening not only introduces its content and its ethical position toward that content—Folman and others‟ relatively naïve participation in the Lebanon War—but also that it introduces the film‟s concern with memory, trauma, and responsibility.
After hearing his friend‟s story, Folman asks whether Rein-Buskila has “tried anything,” like a psychiatrist or shiatsu, to help him process or rid himself of the dream. Rein-Buskila replies that instead, “I called you.” Folman balks and says, “I‟m just a filmmaker.” To counter, Rein-Buskila asks, “Can‟t films be therapeutic?” Their meeting ends soon after some more conversation about the war, and especially the Sabra and Shatila massacre, both of which Folman insists he doesn‟t remember and never thinks about. On his way home, however, Folman has his first flashback of the war: the surreal vision of himself and two other soldiers walking out of the sea near West Beirut, the night sky lit by flares. The three men dress and walk into the city, where they encounter a procession of mourners wailing as they walk toward the soldiers. Paired with Rein-Buskila‟s question, “Can‟t films be therapeutic?” this vision confirms that Waltz is a film about the effort to recover personal and collective memory of trauma on the one hand, and the impulse to forget on the other. In other words, the film asks, “Is it always good to remember the past? If so, then to what extent?”
Troubled by his vision, Folman goes early the next morning to visit a filmmaker and psychologist friend named Ori Sivan. Folman puzzles over the fact that he has discovered what he thinks is a memory of Sabra and Shatila, but that, paradoxically, he is not certain that the memory is real. Seeing that Folman is troubled, Sivan recommends he visit the one other person in the vision that he can identify in order to find out. He reassures Folman that he will only learn things he wants to learn about his past, and then raises a point that is thematized for the rest of the film: “Memory takes us where we need to go.” Armed with this assurance, Folman travels to Holland to speak with his friend Carmi Cna‟an. There he hears the first well-remembered personal narrative from the Lebanon War, which triggers Folman‟s own memories and in turn advance the film‟s meditation on the confusion of war and the nature of responsibility in it.
Cna‟an frames his war story by explaining that he looked forward to his time in the Israel Defense Force as an opportunity to assert his masculinity among the young men around him, whom he felt certain were “already screwing like rabbits.” Nevertheless, he explains, he was fearful, and his reaction to that fear was first to vomit and then to sleep on the boat that eventually landed in he-didn‟t-know-what city (though he suspects it was Sidon). In that sleep, Cna‟an dreamt of a giant woman approaching the boat and swimming away with him as he watched the boat explode after being attacked in an air strike. In waking life, however, no woman came, and the boat landed. Cna‟an and his fellow soldiers began “shooting like
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madmen,” out of fear, at an approaching car. Eventually they moved toward the car in the “terrible silence of death” to find that they had killed a family.
In this scene, Cna‟an‟s memories of both his dreams and the war are clear, just as Rein-Buskila‟s are. Also like Rein-Buskila, Cna‟an is revealed to be a less than eager soldier, and the extent of his willful responsibility for any suffering inflicted seems negligible. So far, then, we have encountered two former soldiers who retain clear memories of the war, and who furthermore are visited by vivid recollections of dreams related to the war. Both men remember of inflicting violence on others because of their training rather than their will, and thus appear to us as tragic, if emotionally distant, figures. The scene I discussed earlier, in which Folman‟s memories return, follows his visit with Cna‟an. Having discovered these memories, Folman begins to pursue individuals who are not personal friends—as Cna‟an and Sivan are—beginning with Ronny Dayag. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2 Ronny Dayag
Dayag‟s memories are at once more detailed and seemingly less believable than Cna‟an‟s and Folman‟s. After being attacked on a tank convoy in southern Lebanon, Dayag was abandoned by his comrades in the tanks that remained intact. Dayag hid behind a rock until nightfall, when he decided to crawl to the nearby sea and swim offshore until it seemed safe to begin swimming south, back toward the border. He swam nearly six miles before heading in to shore and, incredibly, reuniting with the detachment that had earlier left him. His memories of this sequence of events are detailed at every level—from the experience itself, to the things he thought about as he hid and swam, to the guilt he felt after being reunited with his comrades. For much of the scene we are involved in Dayag‟s story as he and Folman narrate in voice over and the visual track represents the scene.
By the time the visual track returns to Folman and Dayag‟s conversation, we wonder whether Folman has discovered in someone else what he desires for himself: clear memories of his involvement in the war that will help him make sense of the experience. But Dayag‟s recollection of the time following his adventure complicates this. He says that after returning, “I wanted to forget. I didn‟t want to relive those moments.” As he says this, the visual track shows a present-day Dayag standing at a distance from the funeral of a fellow soldier (happening in the
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past) as he describes feeling guilty for having fled rather than taken some other course of action. We then see him walking alone in the dark on the beach where he hid from Palestinians after the attack that left him alone. The visual juxtaposition of the older Dayag with scenes from his earlier life, combined with the audio track in which Dayag flatly describes his emotional struggles following the return from war, adds a new layer to Folman‟s search for memory. Rather than straightforwardly assuming that once he discovers what really happened, he‟ll be satisfied or better-adjusted, we must now entertain the possibility that Sivan was wrong—that perhaps memory will take Folman somewhere he does not want to go.
Folman‟s next conversation is with Frenkel, who introduces the orchard scene I explained above. Significantly, this is the first instance after the initial flashback in which Folman was almost certainly present for an event that he does not remember. Now, rather than simply searching for memories on his own, Folman encounters the troubling possibility that he has entirely lost his memories of certain events. Consequently, Sivan‟s claim quickly reasserts itself—that if a memory, say of shooting a child, is too jarring, then Folman may actually be incapable of summoning it. However, by spending time with people who shared experiences with him and do retain memories of those experiences, Folman leaves open the possibility of collective memory working to clarify his experiences intellectually even if he cannot enter into them in the same way he would if he had a personal memory of the event. On the other hand, as Sivan explained earlier in the film by way of describing a psychological experiment in which people generate false memories, it is possible that Folman might insert himself into the situations people like Frenkel describe in order to generate more coherent or comprehensive memories of the experience he does recall. By this point in the film, then, memory‟s nature, operations, and desirability have become quite complicated.
Soon after this, Folman describes receiving the call that he and other soldiers were to go to Beirut after the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, the recently elected and Phalangist-supported president of Lebanon. This is a pivotal point in locating Folman relative to the massacre. Ironically, though, the moment that might most logically call for some contextualization of the Lebanon War is dominated by private memories not even relevant to his fellow soldiers. On a recent furlough Folman had sought to win back the girlfriend who had broken up with him just before he left for war. Now, traveling to Beirut for what would become the war‟s major event and largest tragedy, Folman is preoccupied with death—but not because of war. Rather, he says, “I was having obsessive thoughts about death because my girlfriend Yaeli had dumped me the week before. Death would be my revenge. She would be ridden with guilt for the rest of her life.” This brief but pivotal scene points out that because—and this has been borne out by other comments made by Dayag and especially Cna‟an—soldiers like Folman had little understanding of the situation at hand, their own private thoughts dominated, and they are left with strange memories of having been deeply lonely even as they participated in a national event with a complex history. Further, Folman‟s memories of arriving in Beirut continue in a highly personal register as he fantasizes about leaving for a pleasure trip from the Beirut airport where they landed. That he remembers his fantasies clearly even as he has forgotten major events from the war suggests that he lacked a sufficient framework to incorporate those events into his memories. His own private thoughts were easier to retain, and his desire to leave Beirut was stronger than his understanding of what he was doing there in the first place.
Having mined the contents of his and others‟ memories, Folman is left with little satisfaction regarding the vision from the night of the massacre. He returns to Sivan, who says Folman's vision might not be real, but rather a manifestation of his fear and confusion about the
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massacre. As a solution, Sivan suggests Folman seek out more eyewitness accounts and memories from the massacre in order to put it to rest. His earlier claim that memory will take us where we need to go now sounds different: having seen others‟ memories supplement and jog and clarify Folman‟s before this point, we wonder whether the same will happen in this instance. From this point forward, the film becomes much more like a conventional documentary. Far more of the visual track consists of sound studio interviews, and many of the reconstructions are based on photographs of the camps and specific personal memories from former military officer Dror Harazi and journalist Ron Ben-Yishai. The information they provide is essentially journalistic and pertains far more to the circumstances of the massacre than it does to their more personal memories or thoughts. Their dialogue indicts Israeli higher-ups for having been in the know about the massacre in ways the soldiers on the ground were not, which of course further absolves common soldiers like Folman, Cna‟an, and Dayag of personal responsibility for the tragedy.
The scene following the revelation that defense minister Ariel Sharon knew something about the massacre as it was going on drives this absolution home and, importantly, turns the film back toward the personal before its conclusion. In a conversation with Sivan, Folman describes the distribution of information during the massacre. He says that all around were “circles” of people, each of which had some information about what was happening. “The first one had the most. However, the penny didn‟t drop. They didn‟t realize they were witnessing a genocide.” Sivan asks where Folman was and what he did. Folman replies that he was most likely involved in shooting flares to light the camps while the Phalangists carried out the massacre. Sivan says that at that time Folman didn‟t differentiate between the murderers and those around them; he perceived them as “the same circle” because of his guilt feelings. However, though he felt guilty at the time, “You were there firing flares, but you didn‟t carry out the massacre.” In other words, Sivan suggests, as Folman has remembered—on his own and along with others—his participation in the Lebanon War, he has come to the point of being able to release himself from responsibility for the massacre, knowing he didn‟t perpetrate it. And thus, he is able to recall being near the camps and seeing a line of grieving women come toward him.
The film's final sequence suggests that perhaps Folman cannot let go of his guilty conscience over the massacre. In the beginning of the scene, the physical point of view is aligned with mourning Palestinian women approaching Folman. Eventually the shot zooms in on Folman‟s face as he registers apparent shock, fear and confusion at their grief. After several seconds, the reverse shot appears: archival video footage of women grieving the massacre. The message seems to be that only after gathering information about the circumstances of the massacre could Folman face the truth about where he stood in relation to it. Further, he is presumably better off for having remembered what he did, otherwise he would not have made the film—at least not the way he did. In other words, given that this is a film about the slipperiness of memory and the apparent importance of recovering it, concluding an animated film with actual video footage suggests that there is something real and undeniable about what one finds when memory is recovered—in the case of war, something harrowing that speaks for itself.
Conclusion: Simulation, Thematics, and the Worth of the Waltz
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somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened. Further, I believe that, by and large, narrative texts disclose in their structures the audiences and purposes for which they were created. As I have already pointed out, Waltz with Bashir fronts its purposes from the beginning: to explore the nature and operation of Folman's memory after having participated in and then apparently forgotten a traumatic event for which he might bear some responsibility. Based on the film's content, he obviously hopes that the representation of war and its remembrances will be enough to demonstrate its horror and the confusion it produces. But while Waltz with Bashir does communicate to a certain extent the undesirability of war, the impact of that communication is restricted by the lack of contextualization of Folman's and other Israeli soldiers' lives, but not of the Lebanon War.
The dearth of information we receive throughout the film about not only the interview subjects, but also Folman himself, reveals a significant lack of information on which to build an understanding of or investment in any of the men. We know that Rein-Buskila has unsettling dreams about the war; that Dayag felt guilty for leaving his comrades behind; that Frenkel still uses patchouli; and that Harazi suspected something had gone awry in the camps—but not much beyond that. As for Folman, we know little except that he was somewhere near Sabra and Shatila at the time of the massacre, and further that he has struggled to remember his experiences in the Lebanon War in general. This is hardly the kind of characterization that cultivates deep viewer investment in individuals or their situations. Consequently, viewers must involve themselves some other way in the film's progression from relative confusion to relative clarity of Folman's (and, to a lesser extent, others‟) personal memories. As my analysis to this point suggests, the two most salient features of this film are its representations of scenes of war that viewers physically simulate and its thematization of memories of war experiences.
Those aspects, combined with the absence of significant biographical information about its interview subjects, mean that Waltz is, finally, a film for people interested in the workings of memory—especially in the aftermath of war. It is a film for people interested in the nature of responsibility for tragic acts who do not also need to understand the particular tragedy or the people involved in it in order to maintain interest. In short, Waltz with Bashir is very much an art film, a claim further authorized by the film‟s preoccupation with Folman as an individual and an artist.
Obviously there is nothing wrong with having created a film that deals largely in the abstract with war; witness Apocalypse Now, which Folman names as his favorite war film and an influence on Waltz. However, it is not until the end of the film—its comparatively straightforward journalistic reportage about the carnage in the camps, as well as video footage of the dead and their mourners—that, I would argue, we connect the recollections we have heard and witnessed throughout the course of the film with substantial human suffering. For the vast majority of the film, as we follow Folman's quest to recover his memory, he and the other former soldiers affect a kind of aloof quality that hardly comes across as “uncool,” as Folman hoped. In fact, there is empirical verification that young viewers of this film do not think of its characters as “uncool.”
Waltz's Facebook fan page includes an image, made by a fan, based on a screenshot of Frenkel during his interview. He sits on a stool with his arms crossed, wearing a white t-shirt. In imitation of the popular “Demotivators” posters, the caption reads, “Frenkel: Give him the MAG, or he'll take it by force,” alluding to the scene from which the film draws its title, in which Frenkel takes another soldier's machine gun and heedlessly charges onto a street to fire at snipers in a nearby building. (See Figure 3.)
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 2 (2010) 90 Figure 3 Frenkel
Most of the other images on the fan page are tight screenshots of the young (thin, attractive) Folman at various points in the film. This is not to suggest that other fans and reviewers have not remarked on more harrowing moments of the film—for instance, Cna'an's story about shooting a car and then finding the bodies of an entire family in it. However, the majority of responses to the Waltz on record in forums populated largely by younger viewers are either to its style and aesthetic qualities, or to the absence of politico-historical context.
Waltz represents some obviously horrible experiences: most notably, Dayag's eerie night swim, Cna'an's shooting of a family car, and Folman's encounter with the Palestinian mourners. At the same time, most of the men seem to have become materially prosperous if disaffected: Cna'an is extremely wealthy, Frenkel is physically strong, and Folman is an acclaimed filmmaker. Further, with the exception of Folman's relationship with a girlfriend and Dayag's brief memory of his mother, we have no understanding of what these men‟s lives were like prior to their involvement in the war. As a result, it seems Folman is leaning entirely on the poignancy of the war scenes (and viewer involvement in them) and the emotional distance of his subjects in order to communicate with us about the experience of war.
To a certain extent, these tools are effective: there isn't anything attractive about the war experiences themselves, and no one wants to have a nightmare about being pursued by crazed dogs. But in the end, Waltz with Bashir's psychological explorations are confined to the process of creating it. Cuing simulation—even of the most harrowing experiences—and thematizing memory are not enough to make a forceful point about war itself. They are, however, enough to create a beautiful and innovative new kind of documentary that capitalizes on our cognitive investment in film and our natural interest in matters of memory.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 2 (2010) 91 References
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Nicholas Hetrick is a PhD candidate in English at The Ohio State University. His dissertation explores the meaning and function of disability in contemporary narrative across media. He has published in Disability Studies Quarterly and in a forthcoming volume on multicultural comics.
