Waltz With Bashir: Post-Traumatic Therapy
Waltz With Bashir: Post-Traumatic Therapy
Oscar Jubis
30 March 2009
Filmmaker Ari Folman met his old friend Boaz at a bar one night. Boaz described a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Boaz concluded that it is connected to the Israeli Army mission during the 1982 Lebanon War in which both Boaz and Folman participated. At this juncture, Folman realized that he didn't remember anything about that mission. This bothered him. Waltz with Bashir concerns the process by which Folman recovered his memories of that army mission.
I imagine that someone else in Folman's position might want to leave things intact given the disturbing nature of Boaz's dreams. However, the belief that what we repress from our consciousness will return to haunt us sooner or later is almost unanimous amongst psychologists. Perhaps Folman is aware of this. More specifically, I believe that, for Folman, forgetting a part of his life is akin to not having lived it and thus being unable to learn from it and fully acknowledge himself. All he remembers about his war experience is the furloughs and he feels compelled to remember the rest.
His process of memory recall involves tracking down and having conversations with former comrades in arms. As a result, Folman recovers a dream image in which he is one of several Israelis, wearing nothing but tags and machine guns, wading in shallow water towards Beirut's hotel strip. More subconscious phenomena and conscious recollections experienced by Folman and comrades follow, all of it drawn by Folman's collaborators in a style that resembles rotoscope animation.
Selective forgetting or partial amnesia like Folman appears to experience is typically caused by an experience of such intensity that it overwhelms our faculties to perceive it and integrate it cognitively. In his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna during WWI, Freud acknowledged that neuroses are not only based on internal or psychic phenomena. They are also caused by combat and other intense events.
Folman's journey of memory restoration and cognitive integration ends in Sabra and Shatila. Those are the names of adjacent Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut. The event that triggered Folman's selective amnesia turns out to be the massacre of Palestinians that took place there in September of 1982, shortly after the assassination of Phalange party leader and President-elect Bashir Gemayel.
Near the beginning, Waltz with Bashir ponders whether cinema is therapeutic. Since the main goal of therapy is to bring the subconscious into conscious knowledge, the making of this film obviously had a therapeutic effect on Folman. Insofar as we are able to become conscious of something about ourselves through the experience of others and our responses to representations of the world on film, watching Waltz with Bashir can be therapeutic.
Once the Sabra-Shatila massacre is revealed as the traumatic event responsible for Folman's psychogenic amnesia, he does two things: place it within a historical context and ponder the degree of Israeli complicity and responsibility (and, implicitly, his own).
To the extent that we know something, we know it in relation to other things. So it is imperative to contextualize the massacre in order to understand it. There are two sides to this feature of the human process of understanding. In Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman places the massacre at the Sabra-Shatila camps in relation to Auschwitz, the Nazi camp where his parents were interned, and the Holocaust. On the positive side, connecting and relating one with the other enriches and deepens our understanding of the world. On the negative side, making this association between historical events causes both to lose some of their particularity and specificity. Because of the enormity of the Holocaust and its singular characteristics, some might feel offended and betrayed by Folman's linking it with the Lebanon massacre.
Folman seems most adamant in attempting to understand who is responsible for the massacre. His representation of events underlines that it was members of Gemayel's Phalange party who carried out the massacre. However, Folman suggests that Israelis provided "cover" to the Phalangists and assisted them by firing flares into the air so that they could see in the middle of the night. He's not sure whether he fired any flares. Given the dynamic nature of memory, as explained by a psychiatrist Folman interviews, he may never know with certainty.
Folman's journey from subconsciously repressed experience to acknowledgement and understanding concludes in a sequence of prodigious emotional impact. Animated images yield to archival footage of Palestinian women publicly expressing grief and outrage the morning after the massacre. It's a moment I won't soon forget.
An Experimental Use of Animation
I won't go into any commentary regarding the politics of the movie. Instead I watched it from a cinematic standpoint. For a while and most of the first half of the movie the creative animated techniques used in this movie seemed to dazzle and elicit awed like experiences, like when using 3-D glasses for the first time. However, by the last half of the movie, especially during the documentary-like interviews, I felt disappointed and more removed by the use of animation and felt that live action would have been better suited for these interviews than animation techniques.
It's fascinating to note the one comment regarding the ending and the transition from animated and live footage which I intellectually understood, but the transition failed to have its desired emotional impact with me. There was no suggestion of the primary character in the live footage, no hint of a soldier's brief shadow of a body...so that the one animated scene seemed very disconnected with the following live action scene.
Two movies that seem to have been able to use animated/live action sequences effectively include: KILL BILL Vol. 1 (2003) and
RUN, LOLA, RUN (1998).
Overall, the music was awesome and beautifully in sync with the movie, the animation creative but almost too manipulatively fascinating for its own good.
A SCANNER DARKLY (2006) was probably one of the best uses of this animated technique and the sci fi genre also was more suited and compatible to the animated composition of the film. Whether or not WALTZ WITH BASHIR might have been able to more effectively intersperse the dreamlike memory recall scenes with the use of animated shots with live action is difficult to say. But the attention to little animated details in this movie, especially background details is probably some of the finest around to date.