Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary, follows director Ari Folman’s poignant journey to retrieve his lost memories as an Israeli soldier during the Israel-Lebanon war of 1982. Folman brilliantly taps into the psychology of post-war trauma filtering through memory and history. The director also takes both a personal and historical angle on the devastating massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Christian Phalangist militia, offering compelling insight into the power and necessity of memory despite the convenience of its distortion and repression.
The film opens with Folman sitting in a bar listening to a friend, also a former soldier, as the man discusses a recently occurring dream in which he is confronted by the 26 barking dogs he was forced to shoot during the war. This leads Folman to investigate his own war experiences, which he realizes he has largely forgotten, which surfaces as an imagined yet vivid image of he and fellow soldiers emerging naked from the shores of Lebanon.
While the film essentially functions as a documentary—the interviews Folman conducts are all real, though two interviewees requested to have their words read by actors—the animation adds a surreal quality which enhances memories and dreams, blurring fact with fiction. In one scene, a soldier becomes seasick on the way to Lebanon and escapes from his illness and impending fears through dream. A larger-than-life, nude woman embraces him and brings him out to sea as his ship is blown up in the distance. In another powerful scene, a psychiatrist describes a soldier’s effort to deal with war as if he were viewing the scenes around him as photographs or film stills, though he is jarred back into the present when he confronts a drove of dying horses.
Folman’s use of animals in the film adds emphasis to the civilian massacre of the Palestinian refugees. Just as the soldier is traumatized by witnessing the deaths of innocent horses, so must the Israeli soldiers confront the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians. Folman also questions agency; while it is clear that the Phalangists are guilty of taking revenge on the Palestinians for the assassination of Lebanese Christian President Bashir, he remains haunted by his indirect role in the massacre—shooting flares to light the city so the bloodbath can ensue.
The film’s war scenes alternate between the graphically disturbing and the psychedelic, but the well-assembled soundtrack alleviates the occasional visual blow. Songs like P.I.L.’s “This Is Not a Love Song” usher in a brief return into normal life in a nightclub, and OMD’s upbeat but politically charged “Enola Gay” offers the soldiers aboard the “Love Boat” a diversion as they sail into West Beirut. Conversely, Max Richter’s minimalist compositions add a haunting, classical beauty to some of the film’s more violent scenes, like the gunning down of a young Palestinian boy who launches a rocket-propelled grenade at an Israeli tank.
Folman’s masterpiece offers critical insight into the role of memory loss in the shaping of Israel’s collective consciousness, but it also highlights the redemptive power of remembrance. The testimonials of the soldiers weave together a somewhat distorted picture of human slaughter that they have largely repressed but by which they remain haunted. (ambien)
The disturbing imagery that illustrates this resurfacing guilt, whether in the form of factual or invented memory, culminates in a final scene where news footage of the massacre’s aftermath replaces animation. Thus the audience, like the soldiers who come to terms with their past, is jarred out of a dreamlike animation and pushed into a far harsher reality, one that tragically mirrors our very own.
