Mountain FogWALTZ WITH BASHIR: ARI FOLMAN DANCES WITH HIS DARKNESS
April 30th 2009 07:26
A young Ari Folman is rendered in beautifully sombre tones in Waltz With Bashir.
By the early 1980s, Lebanon’s former status as the Middle East’s greatest tourist destination had been completely destroyed by years as a pawn in the continuing tensions and conflicts between Israel and Syria, the PLO and Muslim Lebanese forces. In June of 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon with the stated aim of driving the PLO forces and their supporters 40 kilometres back from the border between the two countries. After several battles this target was achieved, but the Israelis continued to push on, determined to drive the PLO from southern Lebanon for good, and by the middle of September they had occupied Western Beirut.
At around the same time, Lebanon’s President-elect, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated and this set off a chain-reaction of events that would have dire consequences for the occupying Israeli soldiers. Having surrounded the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee enclaves, the Israeli command authorised the entrance of a Gemayel-allied cadre of Phalangist fighters', with it being claimed that there were approximately 2000 PLO terrorists remaining in the camps. The result was the Sabra and Shatila Massacre in which the Phalangists slaughtered at least 800 civilians in supposed retaliation for the assassination of their fallen leader. It’s a shocking event in modern Middle Eastern history and one that Ari Folman tackles in his intensely personal animated docudrama, Waltz With Bashir.
At the start of the film, Folman is summoned to a bar by one of his old war buddies, who tells the filmmaker of a startling recurring nightmare where he is being chased and surrounded by 26 vicious dogs. Folman listens with interest as his friend attributes the dream to experiences from the war, noting that his own memories of the conflict are virtually nonexistent. But soon after the meeting, he starts to have an obtuse vision of his younger self and two other soldiers bathing in the sea next to war torn Beirut. Confused, Folman takes his vision to a psychiatrist friend, who advises him to seek out other wartime acquaintances and gather their impressions of the conflict. So Folman does, and as he pieces together each of their stories, more and more of his own memories come flooding back, leading eventually to a striking reckoning with his young wartime past.
Folman has taken an interesting approach in constructing Waltz With Bashir. While a straight documentary on the subject matter would have carried plenty of impact, rendering the stories instead with jaw-dropping animation lends each soldier's story an immediacy and intimacy that is hard to resist. A typical documentary will often be talking head driven with a series of frosted re-enactments to give proceedings more pep, but Folman has written Waltz With Bashir in an opposite manner, letting the tales told and dreams described come to life and dominate the film. It’s inspired scripting and lends the film a momentum that is both fascinating and exhilarating.
The animation itself was provided by Bridgit Folman Film Gang, led by chief animator, Tal Gadon, and animation director, Yoni Goodman, and must be experienced to understand its impact. Anybody who has read the graphic novels of Joe Sacco will have some idea of the style of framing, but Waltz With Bashir adds swirling movement and an expert use of colour into the mix. Beirut is rendered in an almost permanent dusk, dominated by crisp golden hues and mournful blues. It’s haunting stuff, and truly comes to the fore in a sequence where a psychologist describes to Folman the experiences of a soldier who coped by viewing everything he saw through an imaginary camera – a tactic that saw him through most of the war until one day his camera seemingly ‘broke’, leaving the young man adrift in his fear and horror.
An older Folman struggles to remember his past.
Throughout, the film benefits from Nili Feller’s snappy editing and the driving score of Max Richter. Richter’s minimalist effort is in turn backed by some telling musical cuts from the era which, as the soldiers play the songs in their tanks and jeeps, provide yet another layer of commentary on the conflict. It’s part of an all encompassing and finely tuned approach that quickly sucks the viewer into the heart of the story, spitting them out 90 minutes later with their heads almost spinning from kaleidoscope of ideas and themes that they’ve just witnessed. To his credit, Folman has also laced Waltz With Bashir with its fair share of gallows’ humour, which helps to slightly leaven proceedings for the audience while making a further point about the ludicrous nature of modern warfare.
This is a remarkably personal film by Ari Folman. Indeed, those looking for a an all-encompassing take on the First Lebanon War perhaps won’t be quite satisfied with this docudrama, but that was never the filmmaker’s intent. Instead, Folman digs deep into the memories of both his and his friends’ confused take on the conflict, discovering more about himself every step of the way and reconciling with the confused youth of a violent past. The final result is a startling meditation on memory, undisclosed guilt and the darker sides of the human condition.
Check out the trailer for Waltz With Bashir below:
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