Film Review--Waltz with Bashir

Waltz With Bashir
written and directed by Ari Folman

How could this happen? It’s a simple enough question but one that most likely elicits no satisfactory answer. In the Israeli-Lebanon war of 1982 hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese in the Sabra and Shatila villages were rounded up and slaughtered by Christian Phalangists. This animated documentary film explores the Israeli forces’ involvement in the massacre. Director Ari Folman was a soldier during the period and this documentary is an attempt to uncover just how much the Israelis knew and if they knew about the severity of the operation why they did nothing to stop it. Specifically Folman wants to remember his role in the atrocities as he has never been able to remember anything regarding the incident.

This is the first Israeli animated feature ever released to theaters. The look of the film is startling and unique and it has a haunting quality that does not easily wash off. It starts off with a sequence in a bar where a friend of Folman is telling him of a dream that perpetually plagues him. We see a pack of wild dogs running through the streets. Their yellow eyes match the terrible yellow of the skies. The dogs are fierce and angry and one is greatly impacted by the terror they represent. There is a very real threat that the dogs will savagely attack anything that impedes their course. The dream stems from an incident in Folman’s past that took place during the war.

Of course there are no answers that can possible bring solace and clarity to Folman or anyone involved either directly or indirectly. In this film there is only a series of questions that bring Folman no closer in his quest for understanding. Through a series of interviews with various individuals with direct knowledge of the political climate that fostered the massacre, Folman begins to put the pieces together.

Many of the soldiers in this film are young guys like Folman, who at 19 joined the Israeli military forces. They don’t understand the intricacies of what they are being instructed to carry out. They simply do what they are told to do because it’s protocol and they are commanded. The massacre plays out like a particularly perverse and surreal drama that effects them only tangentially.

The film is heartbreaking in its immediacy. This is most readily demonstrated at the very end where we see live action documentation of a group of women who have reentered their village after the slaughter. They scream and wail and their pain is devastatingly apparent. Bodies are stacked up and we are left with a clear cut, positive actualization of the impact of the event. The film does not let its audience off the hook and reminds us of just what can happen if certain military and political forces make terrible designs on the lives of the innocent.

This film creates a climate where many questions relating to the miseries inflicted upon the heads of civilian populations can be effectively conveyed. The questions are openly displayed but of course the answers are not so readily apparent. They remain elusive so many years after the massacre and will most likely never be fully realized. Many of the facts are obscured by time and political contrivances and uncovering truth in this matter is a Herculean task. In the film there is not a pressing need to remember. There is simply a psychic recoiling at vague phantasies that plague the mind now and again when its resistance is at its weakest. Ari Folman is in just such a state as the film opens. After twenty years he is haunted by fragments, particularly one scene where he and two other soldiers are submerged in water. They rise and walk naked toward a series of buildings as flares explode across the sky. It’s all he has to go by and it becomes a launching point toward other memories that he recovers upon interviewing various individuals he relies upon to help him connect with his dubious past.

Perhaps the quest for these memories stem from a feeling of guilt that will not wash off. Folman may imagine himself to be responsible somewhat for the massacre and wants to reassure himself that there was nothing he could have done to stop it. By extension he suspects that perhaps the entire Israeli political machinery is complicit in the killings and this thought disrupts his sense of civic pride. However he examines the event, he returns to the same ugly guilt which is what he ventures forth to understand.

One wonders what can be done so many years after the fact to salve the wounds that have been created by such a callous, cowardly act. The Israeli military has been exonerated of all charges and the Phalangists have never been called out for their involvement. It is perceived as something that just happened and perhaps Folman is attempting to bring it into focus so that this younger generation will never be able to forget. The sheer making of this film in Israel is a testament to a sort of collective guilt that must be purged by any means necessary. With the events in Gaza, Israeli military prowess is being examined closely across the globe. It’s a timely subject and one that this film will shed some light upon. If nothing else, it should remind us that even the best intentions can lead to calamitous results if people fail to pay attention.

This film doesn’t indict the Israeli military and leaves the question of their involvement up to those whose business it is to posit such queries. It does however suggest that the officials in charge of managing the Phalangists may have looked the other way when the atrocities were committed. Again, this does not mean that there was a conspiracy to commit murder on the part of the Israeli military. It’s understandable why certain Israeli politicians and pundits have questioned the veracity of this film for the way it portrays the Israeli military and for the very suggestion that they may have been involved in the attack. At this sensitive time when worldwide opinion of the Israeli military is very much at an ebb, it makes sense that this film is being examined in certain quarters quite critically.

Memory is existence. Without memory no society can function, let alone flourish. Folman has brought forth an effort to create a foundation out of memory that can be used to create something beautiful and lasting that will honor these memories and keep them forever in currency. He is not trying to raise the massacre to the level of the Holocaust. He is not in all honesty trying to compare the orchestrators of this tragedy with the Nazis. I wouldn’t even say that he suggests it although it is mentioned in the film. Still, one prays that memory serves as a warning but it never does. Atrocities are committed every day and for the most part the world turns its back and says or does nothing. Humans cannot learn to quell their aggressive drives and the thirst for blood is never ending. It’s the one legacy that endures. This film merely wants to showcase a specific event that caused the deaths of hundreds of people during a heated war with a great enemy. History has not proved the adage that unless we remember the past we are destined to repeat it. Remembering solves nothing by itself. It merely helps assuage the living whose consciences begin to torment them.

Overall, this film is a gorgeously rendered tone-poem to the nature of human brutality and the machinations of war. It provides its audience with insight into its own tendency toward horror and states emphatically that peoples cannot turn their head and pretend that abuses aren’t happening. This film is a tool to help us remember the simple fact that we cannot altogether distance ourselves from those who would take it upon themselves to commit various acts of terror toward civilian populations. We all possess the same drives that lead to atrocities and the film suggests we would best be served never to forget this fact.