SO much of commercial culture and the 24-hour news cycle it supports are based on images and certainty. The former lend credence to the latter, rendering our ability to see the truth in both senses of the term impossible without completing an extra-credit assignment. That’s why we feel so grateful at the end of the animated movie/documentary hybrid Waltz with Bashir: It celebrates the power and primacy of images while calling into question those who create them.
But writer-director Ari Folman hasn’t shot a post-modern paean to opacity. Rather, he’s made a stunning, animated examination of the human psyche, memory and the impact war has on both. And he’s done more than hybridize two genres of cinema; he’s also joined the deeply personal with the geopolitical. It’s as much his story as it is history.
You will never forget so much of what you see here, especially the opening sequence. A pack of yellow-eyed dogs run howling through the streets, their fangs flaring and fur bristling. Cut to an Israeli café, where Folman listens to his friend, Boaz Rein Buskila, tell of his reoccurring nightmare of 26 dogs chasing him–the exact number he shot and killed while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces during the 1982 war with Lebanon.
Buskila’s dream and the horrifying flash of memory it sparks leads Folman to a terrible realization. Folman remembers nothing from his own time fighting in Lebanon, save for one haunting image: naked, emaciated-looking Israeli soldiers emerging from the sea under a burnt-out sky, with the bombed-out remains of Beirut looming before them. They enter the crumbling city and discover a mass of Palestinians screaming and running down an alley. But is it real or another dream?
This question and the general uncertainty of Folman’s memory compel him to visit friends who also fought in the war. Through their stories/memories, Folman hopes to uncover his own — especially the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Christian Phalangist militiamen, rabid supporters of the Israeli-allied Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel, who was assassinated shortly after his election.
The historical backdrop, however, takes a backseat to the vivid rendering of Folman’s friends’ recollections. Folman, along with director of animation Yoni Goodman, shot the real subjects (save for two, who refused to speak on camera), then animated the interviews separately and interpreted their experiences through a combination of flash, classic and 3D. Given the method, it’s natural to ask: Why use animation?
Look to the film’s title. “Waltz” indicates a surrealistic impulse, while “Bashir” indicates a reality-based one. (Apocalypse Now runs a distant second in both respects.) Animation gives Folman the permission to blend the two, mirroring not only the meshing of two cinematic forms, but also that of memory and fact. All of these lines become live wires in Folman’s hands, and he crosses them so that they sparkle and sizzle like flares illuminating the night sky (which is another image from the film that stays with you).
At one point, a professor specializing in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Folman interviews says of a patient’s coping method during the war: “He looked at everything as if through an imaginary camera.” Well, Folman’s camera is real, and so is its power.
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