The Return to Unreachable Spaces in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir
Yuko Yoshida
Abstract
Ari Folman’s documentary film Waltz with Bashir opens up entry points to an ungraspable arena of traumatic memories, tracing the site of the director’s own lack of memory about the 1982 Lebanon war. This article demonstrates the ways in which the film embodies particular spaces for alternative witnessing, focusing on three categories of spaces built in this film: the actual spaces one can picture as simulated geography or architecture; the indeterminate spaces presented as hallucinations; and the inaccessible space of the other. This analysis also goes on to consider how the film mobilizes itself before the displacement of unaccountable antinarrative.
Résumé
Le film documentaire d’Ari Folman, Valse avec Bashir, ouvre un champ presque insaisissable de souvenirs traumatiques, qui pointent vers les souvenirs eux-mêmes incomplets du réalisateur relatifs à la guerre du Liban. L’article analyse comment le film donne une place à des formes de témoignage alternatifs, à travers une lecture de trois types d’espace construits par ce film: les espaces qui simulent une certaine géographie ou architecture; les espaces indéterminés présentés comme des hallucinations; et l’espace inaccessible de l’autre. L’analyse s’intéresse aussi à la manière dont le film s’affiche lui-même face au problème d’un antirécit impossible à convertir en texte.
Keywords
animated documentary, filmic topography, spatio-visual witnessing, holes of memory, limits of representation, anti-architectural spaces
Ari Folman’s documentary film Waltz with Bashir consists of, as a primary narrative structure, an assemblage of differing complex examples of witnessing, various restored or reconstituted memories of the 1982 Lebanon War, which are primarily embodied and mediated through animation. Film critic Garrett Stewart has examined how this film explores numerous hypermediated methods in formulating haunting memories within the cinematic world. He investigates the characters’ witness to buried psychological perceptions of particular war experiences and suggests that “In a film about scrambled memories painfully drawn out of hiding, Folman’s narrative is especially difficult to remember in the exact order or its realist flashbacks and its delusional cover stories. As a psychic topography, it amounts less to an autobiographical through-line than to the layering of a collective unconscious” (58).
Stewart argues primarily that such hard-to-understand scrambled memories derive from multi-layered collections of unconscious remnants, which are held in tension by a “disjunctive force” (60) at work in between these episodes. While these remarks are intriguing, I would suggest from a different perspective that Waltz with Bashir aesthetically distinguishes itself particularly by foregrounding the disjunction of spaces between what has happened and what has been integrated as narrative memory. The emphasis on inherent rupture or gaps in the narrative can also lead us to consider the implications of particular cinematic and architectural spaces and places1 where the witnessing occurs.
Giuliana Bruno has developed various useful critical perspectives on filmic geography by intersecting the concepts of architecture, mobility, and filmic space. Bruno claims in “Site-seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image” that film “has much in common with this traveling geography, especially with regard to its constant reinvention of space” (11). This reinvention of space in moving images presents fundamental similarities with the construction of architectural space through which people move. In further exploring these issues, the work of human geographer Tim Cresswell has provocatively examined the intertwined relations between mobilized place and memory. In particular, he has developed the notion of “the placing of memory,” which suggests that sites are mobilized to (re) produce certain kinds of memory in the public sphere. Indeed, he points out that “One of the primary ways in which memories are constituted is through the production of places.... The very materiality of a place means that memory is not abandoned to the vagaries of mental processes and is instead inscribed in the landscape—as public memory” (Place 85). In line with Sergei Eisenstein’s discussions on architecture and film, Bruno also considers interplays among architecture, film, and memory, claiming that “memory interacts with the haptic experience of place; it is precisely this experience of revisiting sites that the architectural journey of film sets in place and in motion” (Public Intimacy 21). While emphasizing the motion in filmic-architectural space, Bruno, in Atlas of Emotion, underpins the idea of “haptic geography” (64) both in film and architecture, for the haptic is “an agent in the formation of space.... Emphasizing the cultural role of the haptic, it develops a theory that connects sense of place” (6). Notably, Cresswell asserts that “sense of place refers to subjective feelings associated with a place” (In Place/Out of Place 156). By reaching a sense of place infused by tactility, in which certain subjective feelings and perceptions may well be embedded, the perceived materiality of filmic space and its memories emerges from projected images. In yet another article, using the case study of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, Bruno analyzes the plot’s (re)invention of the memories of replicants. Citing how the replicants utilize photographic images to testify to the material past and thus prove their identity as humans with a right to live, Bruno states that photographs are “the documents of existence in a history to be transformed into memories, monuments of the past” (“Ramble City” 72). She examines how visual space in photographic images embodies the materiality of the past and how such images are transformed into legitimating sites for past memories. As a result, one can say photographs can produce particular spatio-visual, architectural images through which new sites for past memories are mobilized.
As these considerations suggest, memories require a haptic materiality of visual images to supplement such external (re)configurations of the past. Thus, perceiving the filmic geography as architectural space provides us with a haptic visuality in filmic space and such architectural space and mobility can be seen 1. See further Tuan (6).
to interrelate significantly with the construction and implantations of one’s memories and histories. This paper, then, will adapt ideas from Bruno’s and Cresswell’s discussions on space, place, and recollection to investigate Waltz with Bashir’s filmic world, and thus to consider how the animated witnessing of former Israeli soldiers produces a complex alternative arena for testimonial spatio-visual narrative on the War and the massacre of Palestinian in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. More specifically, however, this paper attempts to move beyond these two critics’ thought-provoking suggestions to examine how this film embodies gaps, invisible spaces and other un-graspable virtual topographies as significant testimony within the re-enactment of endlessly recurring traumatic memories of former Israeli soldiers. Moreover, I will consider this film’s evocative cinematographic effects in approaching the significance of virtual sites for the secondary witnessing of the deceased victims’ witness, which is inherently impossible to witness.
Beirut and the Space of Destruction
Waltz with Bashir transforms the boundaries between documentary and cartoon animation, between recording and witnessing. The film develops the method of an animated documentary, subverting viewers’ conventional presuppositions of documentaries as authentic historical records and animations as fictionalized and thus inadmissible testimonies. Concerning the hybrid filmic tactics in Waltz with Bashir, critic Nicholas Hetrick notes the difficulty in configuring historical background, emphasizing that the film “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” (78). Certainly it is hard for the viewer to gain historical context from within this narrative. It requires one to have a view from beyond the framework of the film to follow its de-contextualized, de-historicized structure and further to see the unseen gaps in history, or the unprocessed traumatic past. Acclaimed scholar of Holocaust trauma studies and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, however, explains the uncanny structure of one’s traumatic experiences that have yet to be properly processed in memory: “The traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of ‘normal’ reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time. The trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during, and no after” (69). Laub’s insight placing traumatic events outside the terrain of historical temporality and spatiality, and even personal contextualization, resonates with Hetrick’s indication of the out-of-context-ness of this narrative, and the de-historicization of Folman’s work. Films certainly can attempt to expand the unseen offscreen spaces of history, and trauma theorist Cathy Caruth points out a crucial issue: “[t] he history that a flashback tells ... is ... a history that literally has no place ... neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood” (Trauma 153). We could, then, ask the question, what spaces and places does this film position within such non-places of history?
I would assert there are three categories of spaces built into this film: the first is made up of the actual spaces we can picture as simulated geography or architecture, maps or floor plans; another consists of the indeterminate, obscure spaces often visually presented as psychological phenomena such as dreams and hallucinations; and the third is the unreachable field of vision of those who suffered or died in the massacre, that is, the inaccessible space of the other. In the following section, I will deal
with the first category, examining the spatial presentations based on the fragmentary testimonies of the animated characters of former Israeli soldiers. From the beginning to the end of the film, the center of the battlefield, the city of Beirut, is not visualized from the point of view of the inside, it is always depicted from outside viewpoints, mapping the view of the siege of Beirut—from the Mediterranean Sea, or the seashore, from the sky, and even from within the closed view from inside the tanks of the Israeli army. The viewer can visually construct a diorama of Beirut: we can see through the protagonist-filmmaker Folman’s partially restored memories that he entered the war zone riding in a tank, from where the orchards and the seashore appear before his eyes. Folman’s old friend’s animated character, Carmi Cna’an, was, on the other hand, “transported to war on a little ‘Love Boat’” before coming ashore. Another animated character, former soldier and witness Ronny Dayag, describes the landscape he saw as “a really idyllic pastoral scene” when he crossed the border between Israel and Lebanon, at Rosi Nahikra, by tank. It is notable that this film often visualizes a dynamic camera eye from overhead, what might have been called a bird’s eye or God’s eye view if it were not the gaze from a helicopter or a fighter plane. There appear many subjective shots in which the screen or frame forms a scope for firing at a target, so that shooting people becomes either an exciting game or a distanced, indifferent mechanical task. The sense of a mass killing game and the numerous sites of destruction are underlined with ironic cynicism by the voice-over-like lyrics of a rock song in the background, “I bombed Beirut every day…. Sure, we kill some innocent people along the way.”
In such ways, the spatio-visual construction of the city of Beirut always comes along with the destructive reconfiguration of the city. It implies also there are anti-architectural spaces within the process of filmic invention. The fundamental mission of the characters Folman and Carmi Cna’an was to keep shooting at landscapes and buildings, and indeed Folman says he was “shooting everywhere and at everything.” The tank Ronny Dayag rode in advanced into the city, crushing cars and collapsing walls of buildings, and he observes that in a tank, “you always feel really safe. A tank is massive, enclosed vehicle. Inside the tank, we were protected.” The heart of the image of the Beirut International Airport is revealed on Folman’s arrival, marked with the countless traces of gunfire, although he had fantasized about finding a luxurious international gateway, and superimpositions of his fantasized architectural point of entry and the actual images of the despoiled airport are contrastively shown. The breakdown of the cityscape leads us to the symbolical scene of Shmuel Frankel shooting frantically “as if in a trance” like a whirling dervish at a junction near the seashore, where a large poster of Bashir Gemayel, the assassinated president, and leader of the Lebanese Christian Phalange party, looks on. As the voiceover of the TV correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai suggests, this eerie waltz before the unmoving visage of Bashir foreshadows the massive destruction of Palestinian life that is soon to follow, and this solo dance takes place in the middle of a main street which is targeted by the gunfire from the surrounding architectural space, while the background music, a Chopin waltz, highlights the extraordinary nature of this metaphor, proliferating a sense of uncanniness at this grotesque site far from any ballroom. The film’s title alludes to this climactic, extraordinary scene, which disorients any sense of place and space in Beirut, transforming its historically borne image of the most well-known crossroad of commerce and culture in the Middle East.
Offshore: Oblivion Beyond Memory
In dynamic contrast to the envisioned geographical, architectural spaces considered above, Waltz with Bashir also deals with missing spaces, which have disappeared into un-measurable arenas rather like “holes of oblivion” (434), to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, or into the “hole of memory” (65), as Laub puts it. Such abstract holes can perhaps be regarded as anti-architectural spaces or, to put it more precisely perhaps, literally un-graspable spaces, in the sense that they are difficult to recognize or define, much less to enter into or measure. Furthermore, various thought-provoking issues of measurability and contingent tactility arise in considering such powerful but unaccountable spaces. One especially significant region of this kind is the sea, which recurs as an erotic, regressive, deeply comforting but yet also horrifying space that stands apart from the cityscape of Beirut.
The character Carmi Cna’an testifies to Folman that “I sleep when I’m scared. To this day, I escape into sleep and hallucinate. Unconscious on the deck…dreaming a woman would come…and take me for the first time….” Here in the animated hallucination or escapist fantasy, he bears witness to the scene in which a naked woman approaches the transport craft, swimming in the dark, calm sea, climbs onto the deck, and holds him while taking him away from the ship to the battlefield, just before a fighter plane appears in the sky and drops a bomb on the boat. In the world of his witness, the viewer can see this character dreamily holding onto the stomach of an over-sized, naked, yet strangely weightless woman as she is calmly swimming the backstroke, thus linking symbolically the sea and maternity. Approaching this sequence from a psychoanalytical perspective, which the spoken lines of Carmi seem to invite, some might suggest rather simplistically it signifies only his repression, fear and regression toward the secure space of the imaginary woman’s womb, but the images in the sequence, in fact, convey a more complex figure, since sexual desire as well as mothering are emphasized by the form and scale of the woman’s body against the frame. Rather than the straightforward implication of Carmi’s regression into the imaginary woman’s secure womb, which is a static, closed space, the construction of this scene suggests a mobilizing, abstract, and yet evasive space in which he replaces the transport craft with another large “ship” in the shape of a woman, which leaves the viewers with a connoted sense of complex psychosexual desire.
Such filmic embodiment of the deeply feminine sea provocatively falls in line with the argument made with regard to the tangibility of filmic architectural space and desire by Bruno, who points out, “... cinema and architecture are both a matter of touch. The haptic path of these two spatial practices touches the physical realm. Their kinetic affair is a carnal one. In the fictional architectonics, there is a tangible link between space and desire” (“Site-seeing” 20). We should remember how Carmi puts his vision into words in an ambiguous, suggestive way: a woman would “take me for the first time.” His expression involves not only the literal meanings of motion but also his intense emotions and connotations of sexual contact at the site of the hallucination. In addition, the non-verbal, bodily communication between Carmi and the woman in the diegetic space, the monotonous dark blue color of the sea and of their skins, the exaggerated sound effects of waves and the string instruments in the accompanying musical sound track, all contribute to construction of a sense of a particular place within his hallucination and thus enhance a
sense of the real2 and yet also the indeterminacy of the connoted meaning of his witness. Although the
significance of this unsettling scene is difficult to specify, what is clarified however is Carmi’s witness suggesting the sea is a formless, boundless, mobilizing, all-enveloping oblivion that allows him to avoid confronting the horrifying present of the war for even a short while. The intensely surreal and corporeal visibility3 of the sea in Carmi’s memory and hallucination surpasses its merely geographical meaning,
and this overwhelming presence of the boundary-less ocean and the ur-woman as its embodiment appear in his point of view as a space-place that endlessly postpones the landing on Beirut’s shore and integration of memories’ meanings.
However, in great contrast to the fantasized image of the sea in Carmi’s witnessing, the only vision Folman has of the war, which he can barely recall in the form of a recurring flashback, is the scene in which he and his fellow soldiers, bathing in the sea by Beirut city in the night, come out of the sea and enter Sabra and Shatila. As the film moves on, the footage of this flashback, along with the refrain of the soundtrack, “the haunted ocean,” composed by Max Richer, is inserted in the larger narrative many times, but the actual events he presumably eye-witnessed there are never offered as images on the screen. Only at the very end of the film is animation dropped; then, the shocking documentary footage of the aftermath of massacre appears. The sequence of documentary footage is accompanied by no narration, sound effects, or background music. The absolute silence of the archival images becomes a sharp contrast with the diverse voices, sounds, music, and noise in the other parts of the film. What is crucial to remember here is that unlike Carmi’s behavior in the hallucination, in flashback the animated character of Folman, noticing aerial flares illuminating the city, is seen coming out of the sea of his own will and walking into the site where the massacre took place. He cannot recognize his vision as a later-constructed memory or a hallucination he had at the time. The unsettling presentations of this flashback suggest he is haunted by these memories about the war, but it is extremely perplexing for the viewer to try to judge how such jumbled scenes could be connected, or differentiated, or intertwined, particularly when the animated rendition of his vision is abruptly juxtaposed against archival documentary footage. The screened view of what Folman might have seen, which includes the grotesque sight of Palestinians’ corpses stacked in an alleyway, is especially disorienting because of the unexpected utilization of such documentary images. He remains convinced that the events in his flashback did really occur to him. The problem is, however, the viewer cannot judge whether the animated or the archival sequences are flashbacks based on his lived experience or not. Near the end of the film, the lawyer friend Ori Sivan asks and answers a key question for Folman and us: “what does the sea symbolize in dreams? Fear. Feelings. The massacre frightens you, makes you uneasy. You were close to it….” Because Carmi, who was supposed to be with Folman emerging from the sea, bears witness that he does not remember anything about these events, the recurring vision of bathing in the sea might be cast as Folman’s created memory in order to fill in the holes of memories, thus situating it as an unsettling contrast with the sea as a symbolical place of refuge for Carmi.
Yet, what should be emphasized is perhaps the series of actions taken by Folman in the sequence— the movement out of the sea as a site of fear, if we follow Ori’s analysis, and forward into the place of the 2. See also Doane (71-72).
massacre, to the site of further terror. Through the effects of this montage, climactically, the film presents us with what he apparently eye-witnessed there, not through the distance of cartoon animation but more directly through the shaky but seemingly unblinking eye of a documentary camera. Whatever its various connotations, in both Carmi’s and Folman’s case, the space of the sea plays a role as a mobilized framing of the domain of the shore. This shore connotes not only the geographical space of the battlefield but also the terrain of holes of memory, which is in turn embedded among holes of oblivion. This process of mapping by the fantasized inenarrable sea, thus, affects how each of them processes the form of traumatic memories of the war experience, not as a mere fixed set of past events at a stabilized set of sites but as a reflective, evasive, and changeable transformation of haunting past images. As if by uncanny coincidence, both Carmi and Folman bear witness with exactly the same line: the truth of the massacre is “not stored in my system.”
The Unseen View, the Un-translatable Voices
Film critic Raz Yosef explains that Waltz with Bashir places its emphasis on subjective experiences and memories of the soldiers rather than on Israeli collective national memory about the first Lebanon War (314). Put another way, no extended spaces Palestinian points of view could inhabit are explicitly presented in the main narrative, only suggestions of gaps or absences of images4 that “we could not see
in time” (Yosef 320), that is, “what we did not want to see and what we had hoped to forget” (Yosef 322). In an interview in CINEASTE, the director Folman has said about his purposes in constructing alternative images about the war: “I didn’t want to spend four years of my life interviewing Israeli politicians…. I was interested in different things. I was interested in the memory of the massacre as seen by the common [Israeli] soldier, not as seen by a general” (Esther 67). Interestingly, the phrasing here leaves it somewhat ambiguous whether these Israeli soldiers witnessed the massacre or witnessed their own memories, or both. However, it is clear that the filmmaker had more interest in individual historical memories or truths than authorized historical facts, and with no ambiguity this citation shows that the film strives to make viable an alternative memory and recognition of history in opposition to the national memory disseminated in Israeli society. In Israel, which was harshly criticized by the international community, particularly by the UN, for its invasion of Lebanon, the siege of Beirut, and conspiratorial noninterference in the massacres at Palestinian refugee camps by Phalangists, the personal memories based on experiences of the indirect participants or bystanders of the massacre, including the Israeli soldiers, have not been fully shared with others in the public sphere (Yosef 313). Thus, this filmmaking process of creating a new site for witnessing of the former soldiers takes on an important role in the repositioning of the Israeli collective historical recognition of the 1982 Lebanon War.
Looking at this process the other way around, what is crucial to remember, however, is that this film also confronts us with the undeniable fact that there inevitably exists an abyss of unseen spaces of victims’ witnessing, which can hardly be reflected in historical geography. In other words, surveying and measuring these invisible spaces where the victimized Palestinian refugees lived remains beyond 4. Regarding the issue of the intolerable image and the intolerability of the image in its relation with unrepresentability, see further Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator.
our reach, although one can strive for a heightened awareness of their existence. Edward Said, in his article “Permission to Narrate,” discusses how acts of Palestinian nationalism and self-determination are distortedly mediated under predominant Israeli ideological policies as terrorism and violence against peaceful, democratic Zionists, and emphasizes “the absence of a Palestinian narrative” (259). He indicates that “most of the easily available written material produced since the fall of Beirut has in fact not been Palestinian and, just as a significant, it has been of a fairly narrow range of types: a small archive to be discussed in terms of absences and gaps—in terms either prenarrative or, in a sense, antinarrative. The archive speaks of the depressed condition of the Palestinian narrative at present” (258-59). The absences and gaps of Palestinian narrative, what Said calls a barely seen prenarrative or antinarrative, are placed at stake also in this film’s presentation of Palestinian victims of the massacre.
In one especially striking scene, Israeli soldiers are watching at a distance as a Christian Phalangist leads an old Palestinian man into a small building. This scene is visualized based on the testimony of another former Israeli soldier, Dror Harazi, who claims that “[w]e couldn’t hear him [the Phalangist soldier], but his gestures meant, ‘Boom!’ We understand he’d told the man to kneel down before him. When he refused, he shot him in the knee. When he refused again, he shot him in the stomach and head.” The Phalangist soldier’s pantomime gestures are translated and interpreted by the only witnesses, the Israeli soldiers, and no actual voices or images of the Palestinian refugees are heard or conveyed to us or to the world at large. This unspeakably tragic moment is reminiscent of what Shoshana Felman refers to in the context of her work on Holocaust victims’ testimony: “it is impossible to testify from the inside because the inside has no voice” (231)5. In such a way, eventually, the disembodiment of
Palestinian figures is highlighted through the process of double translations. The visions, flashbacks, and hallucinations shown as animations are all based on the testimonies provided through the witnesses in this film, but these animated visual spaces are inevitably presented before us as fragmentary, de-formulated, distant episodes. These witnesses are floating in a space of structure-less-ness, with only an occasional pantomime to hint at what the Palestinians themselves might have sensed.
What the viewer can hear ultimately is only the un-translatable, the heartbroken wailing of the Palestinian women without any translation or subtitles and the ending’s deep silence of the dead. The complex entanglement of images, sound, and even the ambient silences raise for us a further difficult question: how can a film possibly translate the un-comprehensible voices of the victims? Folman himself declared, “I was not interested in a fiction film. I wanted to do it animated because it dealt with memory” (Esther 67), clearly indicating that animation was for him an indispensable choice in making this work. Animation is used as an alternative modality of witnessing by former Israeli soldiers, including Folman himself. In so doing, animation enables them to gain a site for testimony through the duplicated, animated images of the self. However, this cinematographic strategy provides us with few hints for orientation in viewing the final sequence of non-animated, archival footage.
Subsequently, the viewer is posed a question about the meaning of the documentary footage inserted at the very ending of the film. As noted above, the dramatic final montage consists of two sequences: one gradually closes in on the animated face of Folman positioned in the center of the frame, while a chorus 5. See also Barker (62).
of pathetic wails of animated Palestinian women is foregrounded; the other shows archival footage of piles of the dead in various streets in complete silence. Together, the sequences seem to imply that the archival images convey to the viewer what Folman witnessed directly there in 1982 and it is what he could at last recall at the end of his journey towards witnessing, thus conclusively filling in the lack of memory. However, since animation is predominantly used as a method to make the former Israeli soldiers’ witnessing conveyable for the first time, twenty-six years after the war, I would argue that this last archival footage implies that the abrupt shift away from animation also subverts the conventional role of montage, that is, the documentary segments do not and could not re-represent what Folman might have eyewitnessed in Sabra and Shatila. Taking this line of argument leads to an alternative conclusion, one opposed to the typical closure of recovering the lost memories of trauma (Yosef 323-24), and suggests instead that Folman confronts the very limits of his recognition.
One might ask what this lack of recognition implies. Dominick LaCapra argues one should not conflate one’s own voice and/or position with the victims’ in addressing traumatic events: “...another’s loss is not identical to one’s own loss. Everyone is subject to structural trauma. But, with respect to historical trauma and its representation, the distinction between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is crucial” (79). As this citation clarifies, the bystanders’ loss and victims’ loss is not the same and should never be confused as one. If Folman eventually reaches the limits of recognition and representation— or even of empathy—in facing the gaping space of the victims’ loss, the limits should be marked by a mode distinguished from that of the rest of the film. The absence of his memory remains impossible to witness throughout the work, but in particular this epistemological limit entails the inaccessibility of Palestinian witnessing. Nevertheless, the filmic strategy of transformation of modes can effectively avoid confusion of losses on a different level, and most importantly the final juxtaposition of archival footage and animated effects paradoxically enables, in the midst of the tension, the embodiment of gaps or holes, that is, an intense anti-architectural visual space for witnessing Palestinian absence and their anti-narrative.
Furthermore, the Palestinians’ absence or anti-narrative enacts meaning in two forms: one suggesting an inaccessible or incomprehensible terrain of the victims in archival footage and the other creating an unrecoverable “annihilation of a narrative” (Laub 68) through the ellipsis of the scene of the massacre itself. Adapting insights from Bruno, Cresswell, LaCapra and others, I would assert the documentary images of the corpses of Palestinian victims, for the first time perhaps, mobilize an innovative virtual space for testimony in the public domain, in which the absence of Palestinian narrative, to borrow Said’s phrase, is inscribed and narrativized, and such a cinematic space specifies the paradoxical memorialization of victims’ visions, which by their nature are beyond being memorialized. Thus, this climactic footage emphatically illuminates and bears witness to the everlasting un-translatability of the incomprehensible witness of silences, relentlessly drawing our attention to the paradoxical “site of trauma” (Caruth, Trauma 11; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 56). Also, it should not be overlooked that the spatial and temporal embodiment of slaughter is always already mediated by means of a mime, or quasi-translation, or second or third hand witnessing, etc., that is, the film does not merely re-present any Palestinian surviving witnesses who attempt to voice their own narratives. The nearly complete displacement of the moment of the massacre paradoxically but highly effectively invents a virtual arena
for confronting the inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of the victims’ witness in the film. That is to say, the consistent ellipsis of moving images of the moment of slaughter in the ending eloquently witnesses the limits of the Israeli perspective and at the same time the unseen visions of the victims. Conclusion
With her conceptualizations of architectural space for cinematic reinvention, Bruno provides us with an undeniably productive set of tools for film analysis but, as has been shown, Waltz with Bashir in turn offers an extremely interesting contrastive case, in that the film implements a deconstruction of spatial organizing principles, whether for films or for witnessing. Three key anti-spaces, Beirut as a space of architectural, geographical destruction, the sea as a boundless source of desire, fear, and oblivion, and the displacement of the Palestinians themselves, are set apart from the regularly ordered geography we all inhabit in our daily lives, and stand as reference points for assessing the holes and gaps of traumatic memory that can never find direct modes of verbalization or embodiment.
In one pivotal scene in this film, the protagonist’s friend Ori Sivan explains in voiceover what created memories are, while the viewer sees on the screen an animated version of the dynamic re-picturing of the past which he describes. A psychological experiment is related, illustrating how people build their memories; evidently, people “remembered a completely fabricated experience. Memory is dynamic. It’s alive. If some details are missing, memory fills the holes with things that never happened.” This supplementary, authorized background commentary, in one sense, leads us to explore the idea of a seamless, dynamic space, an anti-architectural space of created, negotiated, and even implanted memories or un-spaces of holes. This helpful explanation by a knowledgeable friend sends Folman in search of his own historical truth and understanding.
Similarly, the viewer should not forget the question raised early in the film by another animated friend, Boaz Rein-Buskila, who has been suffering for at least twenty years from hellish repetitive nightmares about the twenty-six dogs he shot: “Can’t film be therapeutic?” The answer to that deeply complex question varies in accordance with the degree to which the film can locate virtual sites for the dialectics of spatial-visual testimony within the powerfully disturbing spaces of the film. Among many possibilities, I would argue the witness involves the main Israeli characters, who are first-hand witnesses, and the viewers, who are secondary witnesses. Waltz with Bashir does not give precedence to visualizing the Palestinian testimony, but what is important are the indications of its absence, the gaps or cracks in space, and their ungraspability, which appear in small but significant alternative spaces within the film. We are relentlessly led to ask ourselves: how can such an arena of cinematic images, in many ways the site of a lack or absence of images, constitute an alternative witnessing? How can viewers, as empathic listeners and as secondary witnesses, respond to the call from this unheard spatio-visual witnessing?
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Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1992. 57-74.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2011. Said, Edward. The Politics of Dispossession. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
Stewart, Garrett. “Screen Memory in Waltz with Bashir.” Film Quarterly. 63. 3 (2010): 58-62.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Yosef, Raz. “War Fantasies: Memory, Trauma and Ethics in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. 9.3 (2010): 311-26.
Filmography
Yuko Yoshida, after completing the master’s program in Film and Photographic Studies at Leiden University, is currently continuing her doctoral research in Japan. Her research interests include film narratology and cinematic spaces-places in relation to witnessing the irretrievable past and present. yuko.yoshida2013@google.com
