Vals Im Bashir

Ari Folman (2008)

This is a work of art in more ways than one.  Ari Folman set out to make a film about his involvement, as an Israeli soldier, in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camp in Beirut in 1982 – and about how, until recently, his mind refused to let him remember the experience.  Once the memories surfaced, Folman – who used to make promotional films for the Israeli army – found them so kinetic, potent and disturbing that he didn’t think a straightforward documentary approach would be able to do justice to the psychic material he wanted to express.  The result is Waltz with Bashir, a rarity (a first?) in cinema because it is an animated documentary.  The images, drawn by David Polonsky, are accompanied by interviews that Folman conducted with friends and others associated with, or qualified to offer psychological perspectives on, the massacre.  This was carried out by Christian Phalangists, assisted by Israeli military, in reaction to the assassination of the Lebanese president, Bashir Gemayel.

The design, colouring and movement of the images are extraordinary.  The figures are doubly expressive:  through what’s in a character’s eyes and body movements and also through what might seem incidental details – how someone scratches his chin or smokes a cigarette or holds a glass of beer.  The way in which the animation seems heightened for dramatic effect is marvellous too:  you’re suddenly aware of a soldier breathing heavily or of a strand of hair on a woman’s forehead caught by the breeze.   The characters are animated in a way that seems to capture their essence:  as a skinny soldier in his early twenties, Ari is narrow-eyed, fearfully watchful; the middle-aged Ari, doing interviews for the film, has put on weight and years but there’s a wariness in his look that recalls the younger man and conveys a continuity of soul.    A recurring image of Ari and two other young soldiers emerging naked from the sea, then standing on the beach pulling on their combat gear against an ominous golden background, has the quality of dream and suggests the dawn of an innocence-destroying new day. (The film’s palette is by no means limited but I think of the core colour scheme as black/grey/yellow.)    Max Richter’s grave, impressive music supports and strengthens these sequences, and many others in the film.  All in all, the concentration on particular details in the look of the figures has the effect – in the scenes from 1982 – of making you feel you’re remembering the salient features of these people; they seem to be etched in memory before your eyes.

What Folman achieves in visual terms has consequences that may be less consciously intended.  I’ve always found it an inherent limitation of animated film – as a medium for presenting emotionally sophisticated material – that the abbreviated expressive range of the drawn characters tends to require more exaggerated vocals (in order to distinguish one voice from another and match it to the image on the screen) than is needed in a film full of real people to look at.   Vocal caricature can’t happen here – so there were points when, in a conversation between two characters, I found it difficult to tell one from the other; and other points where the wonder of the images eclipsed the words to an extent that risked inattention to the testimonies I was hearing.   There is a more important ambiguity too.  Folman’s decision to make Waltz with Bashir as he did is triumphantly vindicated – but I wonder if the animated images, although more emotionally surprising and disorienting than a series of talking heads, are not only a way of expressing the complexity of the director’s memories but also – through their powerful stylisation – a means, in effect, of controlling those memories, of somehow keeping them at an artistically safe distance.   It occurred to me that Folman might be acknowledging this when he inserts, at the very end of the film, actual footage of anguished Palestinian women screaming their grief and outrage to camera, then cuts to piles of corpses of men, women and children in the refugee camp.   Although these images, as news film, are public record rather than private memories, Folman appears to be saying:  ‘This is what it really looked like’.

There is another, especially powerful significance in those final shots of the corpses.  They resonate with the moment earlier in Waltz with Bashir when a therapist friend tells Folman that his mind will inevitably connect the refugee camps in Beirut with ‘those other camps’ – and Folman, in answer to the therapist’s question, confirms that his parents were in Auschwitz.   The modern Jewish mind must naturally feel that Jews are the ones on the receiving end of concentration camp genocide – and perhaps a Jew complicit in genocidal acts has to cope with the complication of guilt and disbelief.  Recoiling from the memory of this kind of complicity may be inevitable.   When you see the dead bodies in the closing images of Waltz with Bashir, you almost do a double take:  these images may be in colour rather than grainy monochrome but the library film of the Nazi camps has now become so essential a part of Western memory that at some level of your mind you think that, because you’re seeing bodies piled up in this way, they must be Jewish bodies – rather than people dead as a result of Jewish actions.  In this moment – and in the next, when (to your relief) the image disappears, the screen goes dark and he cuts to the closing credits – Ari Folman causes the viewer to experience something of the psychic process that the therapist has described to him.

24 November 2008