A Waltz into Trauma

By mistake I saw Ari Folman's animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War, Waltz with Bashir, back in October. Let me clarify, I was in the dreadful city of Brussels, completely exhausted from three days of sleepless travels, and had just escaped along with my companion a meddlesome Belgian--which was not too difficult considering his morning drunkenness, broken leg, and freshly slashed face--who insisted on showing me the main shopping district.


We surreptitiously ducked into a local movie theater, choosing to watch the next available screening, Waltz with Bashir. After the fat Belgian lady working at the counter finally agreed to sell us tickets (she did not think we should see an Israeli film with French and Flemish subtitles while she stupidly identified the Hebrew language film as in Arabic), we settled into our seats and enjoyed a moment's of rest before the start.

I never fell asleep. Waltz with Bashir opens suddenly with frothing yellow-eyed hounds running through nondescript Israeli streets, knocking down everything in their path, coming to a stopping point outside a lone square window where an unshaven man blankly stares into the monsters that haunt him. The nightmare begins.

Director Ari Folman tells the story of himself, a middle-aged Israeli filmmaker who lost his memory of fighting in the 1982 Lebanon war at the age of 19. The scene of the hounds, a recurring nightmare told to the aged Folman by a fellow soldier, jump starts his psychological journey to recapture his own memory of the war. The result of this journey is the creation of Waltz itself, an imaginatively construed world outside of our earthly dimension. Art director and illustrator, David Polonsky, and director of animation, Yoni Goodman, execute richly colored, chiaroscuro illustration that recalls the aesthetic quality of graphic novels.


Folman's film becomes a reflection on the dynamic nature of his fractured memory, as he investigates the reality of the blocked experiences by seeking out, and conducting interviews, with others present alongside him during the war. We witness Folman's live interviews (two dubbed over for the sake of anonymity) that take place in illustrated bars, rural homes, or a car, splicing immediately over to the recalling of dreamy sequences of escape and hipnotic meditations on horrific war scenes. The soundtrack propels this pschyedelic discplacement of experience, ranging from rhythmic drum claps mirroring the movements of a racing heart during night terrors, ironic pop music chanting about the thrills of bombing Lebanon reflecting the soldier's experience of returning from war to a land of general normalcy, and the incessant machine gun fire--chilled by the silence of death.

How does one recount the atrocities of war? What creative form might inch towards capturing the its reality, a reality that by its very natue eludes our grasp? A reality that human nature resists, repressed into the realm of myths, denied and blocked up in the subconscious. How might one detail the journey of recollecting this lost memory, divided and traumatized by its origin? Waltz thrusts the the unreal into the real, seamlessly layering hallucination with brutal fact, the construction of memory with some truth to be remembered. There might be no more exacting medium than animation to disclose such interplay between the imaginary and the real, and the complete breakdown of these categories when taking up the horrors of war.

Throughout the narrative we see repetitive sequences of the younger Folman wading in the sea outside of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps where Lebanese Phalangists massacred thousands of Palestinians in vengeance of the assassinated president-elect of Lebanon Bashir Gemayel. Folman struggles with his guilt, coming to acknowledge the fact that he, and otherIsraeli soldiers, permitted the Phalange militia men to enter the camps. They stood by a few hundred yards away, perhaps unable to believe the sure signs of the massacre right before them.

In the dreamy state Folman rises to the shores with his troupe. They dress in fatigues under dreary, yellowed sky lit by flares and walk sullenly into the dilapidated, blown out buildings of West Beirut. The sequence repeats on end throughout the narrative, reaching a corner turned where hijab adorned women scream in terror, yell, and then the whirling sound of silence. Again and again the audience witnesses this scene, anticipating the view of atrocity, dreading the moment, and again and again, the impending fact is cut off from us.


Folman faces the problem intrinsic to any documentary of atrocity; how does a director disclose such brutality without turning it into a spectacle? How might a filmmikar avoid transforming such horrors into phantasmagoria for our own entertainment, seated in cushioned theater chairs, our bodies circuited into a lit up screen that affords a vicious movement of suspense and drama.

In the final scenes of Waltz Folman transitions abruptly from the magestically powerful animated world into gritty, documented footage of the massacre. We see bodies stacked and beginning to rot, rubble and human parts indistinguishable, the spilled entrails of a ferocious massacre. And just for a moment we are taken to this time and place, thrown violently outside the bounds of the protected camera lens, enveloped within the horror.

Somehow Folman's animated, hipnotic dimension prepares us for this task, doing consistent labor on our sentiments, shaping our abilities to imagine the impossible, and fooling the body's defense mechanisms into accepting the most unreal of all realities. For a moment, the veils of the spectacle fall back, the protective cognitive system breaks down, just a moment enough to grasp the absolute terror.

Folman's final work is nothing short of a masterpiece, a compelling anti-war documentary that achieves the most exemplary of moral efforts: to disclose the genuine reality of horror and trauma, hoping to guide us to feel the obligation of working towards its demise.