In her reflexive essay, “Framing the Postmodern: The Rhetoric of Animated From in Experimental Identity-Politics Documentary Video in the 1980s and 1990s, Tess Takahashi contemplates the subject of animated documentaries, citing the present anxieties about digital animation’s supposed destabilization of the relationship between sign and referent. Specifically, Tess relates the perception that video technology flattened our sense of history, representation, and truth. She eventually concludes the ability of animation to extend past authentic mirroring of personal experience to instead act as critical intervention within documentary practice. And through animation, artists could investigate the personal, historical, and discursive conditions under which subjectivity was constructed.
With its status as an animated documentary, Waltz of Bashir stands as a prime example of personal discourse. The use of a primarily animated visuals connects experimental identity-politics further to its referents versus the common usage of photos, found footage, and original live-action footage. Waltz follows retired soldier and director, Ari Folman, discussing his experiences as a young teenager during the Lebanese War. Eventually, his character’s animated world fades to the gruesome reality of the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
Rather than seeing the animation employed as a flattening tool to tamper with the truth, Folman utilizes his distinct animation to illustrate personal experiences that lacked media to communicate. Centering on the scene of the waltz (where the work partly takes its name from) of his comrade amidst gunfire, the scene animates Folman’s perception of his experiences while connecting his apparent fluctuating memory of the Lebanese War which otherwise wouldn’t have had media to visualize it.
Works like these should stand to juxtapose the prevalence of popular media that does threaten the sign from the referent. The nature of this kind of work enacts generative discourse of personal and historical conditions without driving a wedge between the storyteller and subject matter.
The ending where the distraught civilians lament the unjust slaughter of their brothers and sisters was probably seen under different lights. To the past people of the world during this event, looking in from the the outside, sympathy for the pained Lebanese people probably lacked certain contextual information that would make the latter’s grief better understood. Now, the Waltz with Bashir may not serve as the quintessential illustration of the events, but it does offer perspective and context to better understand the otherwise flattened history and experiences of the war torn civilians.
Waltz with Bashir calls for the need to see animation as a rhetorical tool that helps artist’s produce significant interventions into contemporary discourse. While the plot and perspective of this movie may not align with the truth of others, the animation employed allows Folman and his team to communicate the former’s own truth in regards to this event. In conclusion, the film does not destroy the personal side of this identity political documentary but instead enforces it.
One quote that specifically stood out to me from Tess Takahashi’s “Framing the Postmodern: The Rhetoric of Animated Form in Experimental Identity-Politics Documentary Video in the 1980s and 1990s” was, “Still, despite all this animation and manipulation, there remained a strong tendency to see video as a mirror of the self that reflected the author-subject rather than figuring the field of video as a complex discursive space.” This particularly struck me because of how I initially perceived Waltz with Bashir versus the reality of the situation. Because I didn’t know much of the history of what occurred before watching Waltz with Bashir, I immediately took what I saw as truth. I only happened upon reality as I was doing more research on the film. Initially, I felt betrayed by the movie for not showing that the situation wasn’t as black and white as portrayed, but eventually I realized that the filmmaker did believe it to be true. That’s why even though he depicted atrocities in the film, it was always sympathetic to the soldier. Even at the end of the film when showing the live footage of the Muslims in the camp, the Muslim women have no “voices”, with the viewers only able to make out words in a foreign tongue, without subtitles, and wailing. The filmmaker doesn’t think he is intentionally suppressing the other side of the story, but perhaps subconsciously doing this, he already makes his side more understandable and relatable, and more likely for the viewer to be sympathetic.
In the source from Stanford on the philosophy of postmodernism, there is a section on genealogy and subjectivity that will be the start of my thoughts relating Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir with postmodernism. In this source, Michel Foucault’s view on history is framed as a fiction that is invented from modern discourses after the fact, that there is a temporality that excludes elements of chance and contingency in the fiction of modernity. He has used genealogy to create “counter-memory,” or “a transformation of history into a totally different form of time.” This accomplished through the “dissolving identity for the subject in history by using… modern historical research.”
In the film, Folman sets on a course to discover his own forgotten war-involved past. And he reconstructs this through interviews and discussions with his friends. The film also explicitly comments on memory, stating that it doesn’t take people where they don’t want to, that it goes where people are willing to go. In this statement, the films involvement in a postmodern philosophy is seen through the involvement of memory in recalling Folman’s personal history. Foucault’s view of history as “fiction” is completely realized in this film, as Folman’s memories would have a hard time being labeled as fact. The telling of this story through animation plays into this as well. There is a subjectivity already present because of the medium and how Folman chose to employ it. Beyond the scope of this film, how does animation’s treatment of memory and histories play into the philosophy of postmodernism?
Watching “The Sinking of the Lusitania” brought me back to the questions we had discussed in class. What responsibility does the artist have in making a documentary? (this may not be the exact way you phrased it but nevertheless). I had suggested that one thing the artist owes is telling the truth. There are multiple viewpoints or perspectives one can view a particular incident or event therefore there can never truly exist an absolute truth, only relative or perspective truths. Even then, I do not believe “The Sinking of the Lusitania” fulfilled the one requirement I argue exist for a film to be classified as a documentary, the film twisted “facts” to make a “distorted truth” which is quite different from other truths. I would classify the “The Sinking of the Lusitania” more as a propaganda than a documentary. For instance, the film made the Lusitania appear as a simply as a passenger ship, which is incorrect because it was listed as an auxiliary war ship. Waltz with Bashir maintain its classification as a documentary I argue because it was truth in the eyes of Ari Folman.
Ari Folman’s decision to animate his political documentary entitled Waltz with Bashir (2008) was definitely the right choice, which can be supported by the numerous awards the film has both been nominated for and won. A quote from Tess Takahisi’s essay “Framing the Postmodern” provides some insight into breaking down why this is the case. Takahisi states, “On the one hand, video was figured as a mirror, capable of rendering an accurate documentary image of its often minority subject-author. On the other hand video via editing and animation also was figured as the opposite of a mirror, a field of playful experimentation that could be used to render that minority subject fragmented, unstable, and critical of the notion of coherent subjectivity (215).” The paragraph then goes on to say that, ironically, editing of the self with animation is often read as a mirror of the subject’s inner state, rather than as a discursive intervention, thus making it even more authentic than the former situation of video as a mirror. I found this excerpt very intriguing because I completely agree with it, but had not previously put the pieces together to put the concept into words before reading this piece. There is something about the way these political animated documentaries are done that makes one feel they are looking deep inside the subject matter and deep inside the subject-author’s thoughts, feelings, and inner self. This is not to be said of animation general – Mickey Mouse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles do not have the same effect – but from my brief encounters with the animated political documentary genre, it holds true and Waltz with Bashir (2008) is one of those encounters.
I found it interesting that over cinematic history, the cinematic documentaries, animated and not, are considered to be products of a broken spirit rather than reflections of ideologies. In other words, rather than illustrating a societal problem or far-reaching experience the documentaries reflect more along a “case by case” basics. It is interesting that the marginalization of these groups of people manifested itself in a way that was devaluing and trivializing. The pain and focus in each text was compared to “broken spirits” and deviating mental states of mind, rather than used to learn from or have generative dialogue.
“Since the early ‘70’s, the reigning interpretation of Eurocentric film theory has led to the fetishisation of formal complexity and the obsessive search for visual illustrations of psychoanalytic ‘truths’.”
Response to Sinking of the Lusitania and Waltz with Bashir: I was able to watch all of the Sinking of the Lusitania in one go and had to break up the Waltz into pieces. This is because the suffering depicted in the latter film was a bit overwhelming. I did have an emotional reaction to the first and it was accentuated by the soundtrack that accompanied the animation. Waltz with Bashir’s music was more impactful because the animation depicted graphic situations. Even though nothing too graphic was shown, the anatomically correct people animated dying in time to music both lighthearted and not was very sad. I took a walk later and spent some time listening to music that was more pleasant to soothe myself. This reminds me of how impactful a soundtrack can be when trying to inspire an audience to feel a certain way. The rock music in Waltz with Bashir actually made the tanks blowing up and unintended casualties during the pursuit of the car that fired at Bashir’s side more jarring. A similar effect is used in A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick while the main character Alex is being tortured to the sounds of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The music is a standard symbol of the classic, traditional, and upper-status, paired with images of murder and rape. This unlikely combination makes Alex’s treatment, especially as he begs for the piece not to be used, all the more unsettling. The soundtrack is instrumental to highlighting the grotesque nature of the films, and without them, the nature of the texts would be much less powerful.
I would consider Waltz a film that is life changing- but one that warrants additional investigation. The emotional impact this film delivered was unprecedented to me, and I was floored after watching it for the first time. A viewer sits watching an animated film, covering war and death and struggle, only for the final scene to show the dead. Arguably, Waltz with Bashir is a snuff film. The use of animation to shelter a viewer from the violence only to show it uncensored was a shock. However, the critics for Waltz have attacked it, claiming that the director whitewashed the role of Israel. He has also been attacked for over-representing Israel’s role. Using animated footage to produce a documentary can allow for that conflict to arise- rather than showing exactly what happened, an editor can take liberty with the occurrence and shape it in his own view. In retrospect, that changes the impact of the movie.
Near the end of the film, Ari Folman says to his friend “It’s a vision” who replys “It’s still real” and these lines capture what the animated documentary is. The animated documentary is not about factual reality; it’s about the real experiences of the person telling the story. Via animation memories, dreams, and hallucinations become pseudo experiences for the viewers, in ways that simply listening to a narrative cannot provide. Animation is a somewhat surreal medium and it serves well in this film’s surreal juxtaposition of youth and war, specifically the sequences of soldiers partying while killing and being killed. In the film, a psychologist mentions a veteran who coped with trauma by pretending to see things through a camera lens. Perhaps animating this film is a way for the filmmaker to cope with his own trauma. Through the sequences shown, it doesn’t feel like a forced live-action reenactment, it gives the air of conveying the true feelings of the people telling the story.
What struck me most about this film was that, though at first I thought it was about the massacre of Palestinians, there are essentially none present in the film. That’s because this film wasn’t about the killing of Palestinians; it is critical of war not because of the violence and tragedy that results from war, the devastation of civilians in particular, but about the emotional toll that war takes on soldiers. The director can say the words “women and children” as much as he likes, but ultimately it isn’t about them. It isn’t even about forcing the people who let the atrocity take places before their eyes, or Israel, face what was done to those women and children. After all, the film asserts that memory only takes a person where they want to go. It might ask how such a thing could take place, but it answers it by placing blame on Christian radicals, and highlighting the trauma of the soldiers. That trauma is valid, but where is the sense of accountability? The regret of onlookers is a recurring theme in history—why didn’t the world step in earlier in Germany, Rwanda?—but Israel wasn’t an onlooker in that war. Not even a little bit. Its military was occupying the region after invasion, sharing the city itself with its ally perpetrators, and further research reveals that the IDF blocked residents from leaving the camps at the request of the Phalanges the night of the massacre. And again, I ask: where are the Palestinians? Where is their suffering humanized, like the trauma of the Israeli soldiers? It even suggests that the director’s trauma is due not the suffering of the Palestinians, but of his parents’ and his people’s suffering in the Holocaust. Being an animated documentary, it has more freedom to illustrate the recollections and experiences on screen; why, then, is the experience of the Palestinian nothing more than an illustration of a gruesome sight, an expressionless sea of bodies? Perhaps the documentary shows them this way because the Israeli soldier just can’t connect with their suffering; many of the interviewees do mention blocking out horrors. But the film isn’t critical of this, and it doesn’t remind us that they did, in fact, suffer as humans, and that Israel was deeply involved in that, albeit in a politically complex war.
Also on my mind as I questioned the honesty of this film’s intent, or its carelessness towards human suffering, was whether perhaps the animated medium provided more honesty to the documentary genre than the supposedly objective cinematic lens. After all, the documentary footage at the end, meant to tether the massacre to reality, was somewhat deceptive in that it failed to show the humanity of the senselessly wailing (notably not subtitled) Palestinian woman in even half the empathetic light of the careful, thoughtful expressions of the animated Israeli soldiers.
What should the purpose of a documentary be? This question kept coming up while I was watching Waltz with Bashir. To me it seems that there are certain associations with truth and conscience that come with calling a film a documentary, namely that a documentary does not outright lie about what it investigates and, in my experience, it seems that documentaries are often calls to conscience. To this end, I have a few areas in which I was disappointed by why what otherwise was a beautifully crafted, thoughtful film.
One major thing that the film does not seem to really address, perhaps because the whole context of the event is so well known by its Israeli target audience. The Palestinian Liberation Organization withdrew in the days leading up to the massacre, and by the terms of the ceasefire to which it and Israel had agreed, Israel could not legally advance across West Beirut to reach Sabra and Shatila. Thus, though the film does document wonderfully the post-service struggle of a soldier who took part in an atrocity to understand the events that took place, its discussion of the politics of the war itself and the context of the occupation of the region omits a lot, or at least skimmed by it so quickly that I missed it despite being quite engrossed in the film.
Thus I am left with the question that I posed to start this response: what should the purpose of a documentary be? I can’t answer this question as I am no authority on such things, yet it seems that no documentary can tell the whole truth from all sides of an issue, though the best come close. Is it ok then that, as in the case of Waltz with Bashir, a film can make an appeal to conscience in regards to some events but withhold the entire truthful context and still be given the assumed mantle of truthfulness of documentary by the uneducated masses, such as myself, who cannot really say just what a documentary is?
Its very interesting to see how this film was both a blend of fiction and nonfiction. Thematically this matches up with the main protagonist wrestling with what is real and what isn’t real in his life too. Its hard for him to distinguish it and it really matches up earlier with what the other guy was saying about how when shown a photograph he places himself in it and a whole story is formed for that event, event though he wasn’t there.
***
It is always interesting to revisit films I watched in an academic setting. I get to view how far I’ve progressed as both a scholar and a student. The above was the response that I gave a year and a half ago for Waltz with Bashir in Prof. Koepnick’s Intro to Film and Media Studies course. To be frank, I was quite disappointed with my spelling errors and the lack of depth in my response. But brief as my response is, I still embrace the idea in my old response: the blurring of fiction and nonfiction. But to add on that, I want to connect the point to the medium/genre of animation and documentaries. I recall being confused as to why the director would present a subject that would commonly be tackled in a live-action objective documentary. But the truth of the matter is that documentaries still have someone behind the camera. What the director chooses to add or not add is still their choice. Consequently, documentaries can be just as subjective as a fictional film. So in using an animation, it would seem like animation is a whole hearted acceptance of the subjective and the abandonment of the objective. In animation, one can literally create their own images and move them at their own discretion and show their own subjective truth.
Additional: We all make our own subjective narratives in life. We see patterns in the events in our lives and we ourselves reign agency over what type of story this tells. This doesn’t make this truth any lesser than the objective truth because to whom do we owe the truth anyway. Who cares if he was never in the photograph, does the feelings and affect he feel from the photograph feel any diminished?
Animation: A History Flux 
Animating Personal Experiences
In her reflexive essay, “Framing the Postmodern: The Rhetoric of Animated From in Experimental Identity-Politics Documentary Video in the 1980s and 1990s, Tess Takahashi contemplates the subject of animated documentaries, citing the present anxieties about digital animation’s supposed destabilization of the relationship between sign and referent. Specifically, Tess relates the perception that video technology flattened our sense of history, representation, and truth. She eventually concludes the ability of animation to extend past authentic mirroring of personal experience to instead act as critical intervention within documentary practice. And through animation, artists could investigate the personal, historical, and discursive conditions under which subjectivity was constructed.
With its status as an animated documentary, Waltz of Bashir stands as a prime example of personal discourse. The use of a primarily animated visuals connects experimental identity-politics further to its referents versus the common usage of photos, found footage, and original live-action footage. Waltz follows retired soldier and director, Ari Folman, discussing his experiences as a young teenager during the Lebanese War. Eventually, his character’s animated world fades to the gruesome reality of the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
Rather than seeing the animation employed as a flattening tool to tamper with the truth, Folman utilizes his distinct animation to illustrate personal experiences that lacked media to communicate. Centering on the scene of the waltz (where the work partly takes its name from) of his comrade amidst gunfire, the scene animates Folman’s perception of his experiences while connecting his apparent fluctuating memory of the Lebanese War which otherwise wouldn’t have had media to visualize it.
Works like these should stand to juxtapose the prevalence of popular media that does threaten the sign from the referent. The nature of this kind of work enacts generative discourse of personal and historical conditions without driving a wedge between the storyteller and subject matter.
The ending where the distraught civilians lament the unjust slaughter of their brothers and sisters was probably seen under different lights. To the past people of the world during this event, looking in from the the outside, sympathy for the pained Lebanese people probably lacked certain contextual information that would make the latter’s grief better understood. Now, the Waltz with Bashir may not serve as the quintessential illustration of the events, but it does offer perspective and context to better understand the otherwise flattened history and experiences of the war torn civilians.
Waltz with Bashir calls for the need to see animation as a rhetorical tool that helps artist’s produce significant interventions into contemporary discourse. While the plot and perspective of this movie may not align with the truth of others, the animation employed allows Folman and his team to communicate the former’s own truth in regards to this event. In conclusion, the film does not destroy the personal side of this identity political documentary but instead enforces it.
LikeLike
One quote that specifically stood out to me from Tess Takahashi’s “Framing the Postmodern: The Rhetoric of Animated Form in Experimental Identity-Politics Documentary Video in the 1980s and 1990s” was, “Still, despite all this animation and manipulation, there remained a strong tendency to see video as a mirror of the self that reflected the author-subject rather than figuring the field of video as a complex discursive space.” This particularly struck me because of how I initially perceived Waltz with Bashir versus the reality of the situation. Because I didn’t know much of the history of what occurred before watching Waltz with Bashir, I immediately took what I saw as truth. I only happened upon reality as I was doing more research on the film. Initially, I felt betrayed by the movie for not showing that the situation wasn’t as black and white as portrayed, but eventually I realized that the filmmaker did believe it to be true. That’s why even though he depicted atrocities in the film, it was always sympathetic to the soldier. Even at the end of the film when showing the live footage of the Muslims in the camp, the Muslim women have no “voices”, with the viewers only able to make out words in a foreign tongue, without subtitles, and wailing. The filmmaker doesn’t think he is intentionally suppressing the other side of the story, but perhaps subconsciously doing this, he already makes his side more understandable and relatable, and more likely for the viewer to be sympathetic.
LikeLike
In the source from Stanford on the philosophy of postmodernism, there is a section on genealogy and subjectivity that will be the start of my thoughts relating Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir with postmodernism. In this source, Michel Foucault’s view on history is framed as a fiction that is invented from modern discourses after the fact, that there is a temporality that excludes elements of chance and contingency in the fiction of modernity. He has used genealogy to create “counter-memory,” or “a transformation of history into a totally different form of time.” This accomplished through the “dissolving identity for the subject in history by using… modern historical research.”
In the film, Folman sets on a course to discover his own forgotten war-involved past. And he reconstructs this through interviews and discussions with his friends. The film also explicitly comments on memory, stating that it doesn’t take people where they don’t want to, that it goes where people are willing to go. In this statement, the films involvement in a postmodern philosophy is seen through the involvement of memory in recalling Folman’s personal history. Foucault’s view of history as “fiction” is completely realized in this film, as Folman’s memories would have a hard time being labeled as fact. The telling of this story through animation plays into this as well. There is a subjectivity already present because of the medium and how Folman chose to employ it. Beyond the scope of this film, how does animation’s treatment of memory and histories play into the philosophy of postmodernism?
LikeLike
Watching “The Sinking of the Lusitania” brought me back to the questions we had discussed in class. What responsibility does the artist have in making a documentary? (this may not be the exact way you phrased it but nevertheless). I had suggested that one thing the artist owes is telling the truth. There are multiple viewpoints or perspectives one can view a particular incident or event therefore there can never truly exist an absolute truth, only relative or perspective truths. Even then, I do not believe “The Sinking of the Lusitania” fulfilled the one requirement I argue exist for a film to be classified as a documentary, the film twisted “facts” to make a “distorted truth” which is quite different from other truths. I would classify the “The Sinking of the Lusitania” more as a propaganda than a documentary. For instance, the film made the Lusitania appear as a simply as a passenger ship, which is incorrect because it was listed as an auxiliary war ship. Waltz with Bashir maintain its classification as a documentary I argue because it was truth in the eyes of Ari Folman.
LikeLike
Ari Folman’s decision to animate his political documentary entitled Waltz with Bashir (2008) was definitely the right choice, which can be supported by the numerous awards the film has both been nominated for and won. A quote from Tess Takahisi’s essay “Framing the Postmodern” provides some insight into breaking down why this is the case. Takahisi states, “On the one hand, video was figured as a mirror, capable of rendering an accurate documentary image of its often minority subject-author. On the other hand video via editing and animation also was figured as the opposite of a mirror, a field of playful experimentation that could be used to render that minority subject fragmented, unstable, and critical of the notion of coherent subjectivity (215).” The paragraph then goes on to say that, ironically, editing of the self with animation is often read as a mirror of the subject’s inner state, rather than as a discursive intervention, thus making it even more authentic than the former situation of video as a mirror. I found this excerpt very intriguing because I completely agree with it, but had not previously put the pieces together to put the concept into words before reading this piece. There is something about the way these political animated documentaries are done that makes one feel they are looking deep inside the subject matter and deep inside the subject-author’s thoughts, feelings, and inner self. This is not to be said of animation general – Mickey Mouse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles do not have the same effect – but from my brief encounters with the animated political documentary genre, it holds true and Waltz with Bashir (2008) is one of those encounters.
LikeLike
I found it interesting that over cinematic history, the cinematic documentaries, animated and not, are considered to be products of a broken spirit rather than reflections of ideologies. In other words, rather than illustrating a societal problem or far-reaching experience the documentaries reflect more along a “case by case” basics. It is interesting that the marginalization of these groups of people manifested itself in a way that was devaluing and trivializing. The pain and focus in each text was compared to “broken spirits” and deviating mental states of mind, rather than used to learn from or have generative dialogue.
“Since the early ‘70’s, the reigning interpretation of Eurocentric film theory has led to the fetishisation of formal complexity and the obsessive search for visual illustrations of psychoanalytic ‘truths’.”
Response to Sinking of the Lusitania and Waltz with Bashir: I was able to watch all of the Sinking of the Lusitania in one go and had to break up the Waltz into pieces. This is because the suffering depicted in the latter film was a bit overwhelming. I did have an emotional reaction to the first and it was accentuated by the soundtrack that accompanied the animation. Waltz with Bashir’s music was more impactful because the animation depicted graphic situations. Even though nothing too graphic was shown, the anatomically correct people animated dying in time to music both lighthearted and not was very sad. I took a walk later and spent some time listening to music that was more pleasant to soothe myself. This reminds me of how impactful a soundtrack can be when trying to inspire an audience to feel a certain way. The rock music in Waltz with Bashir actually made the tanks blowing up and unintended casualties during the pursuit of the car that fired at Bashir’s side more jarring. A similar effect is used in A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick while the main character Alex is being tortured to the sounds of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The music is a standard symbol of the classic, traditional, and upper-status, paired with images of murder and rape. This unlikely combination makes Alex’s treatment, especially as he begs for the piece not to be used, all the more unsettling. The soundtrack is instrumental to highlighting the grotesque nature of the films, and without them, the nature of the texts would be much less powerful.
LikeLike
I would consider Waltz a film that is life changing- but one that warrants additional investigation. The emotional impact this film delivered was unprecedented to me, and I was floored after watching it for the first time. A viewer sits watching an animated film, covering war and death and struggle, only for the final scene to show the dead. Arguably, Waltz with Bashir is a snuff film. The use of animation to shelter a viewer from the violence only to show it uncensored was a shock. However, the critics for Waltz have attacked it, claiming that the director whitewashed the role of Israel. He has also been attacked for over-representing Israel’s role. Using animated footage to produce a documentary can allow for that conflict to arise- rather than showing exactly what happened, an editor can take liberty with the occurrence and shape it in his own view. In retrospect, that changes the impact of the movie.
LikeLike
Near the end of the film, Ari Folman says to his friend “It’s a vision” who replys “It’s still real” and these lines capture what the animated documentary is. The animated documentary is not about factual reality; it’s about the real experiences of the person telling the story. Via animation memories, dreams, and hallucinations become pseudo experiences for the viewers, in ways that simply listening to a narrative cannot provide. Animation is a somewhat surreal medium and it serves well in this film’s surreal juxtaposition of youth and war, specifically the sequences of soldiers partying while killing and being killed. In the film, a psychologist mentions a veteran who coped with trauma by pretending to see things through a camera lens. Perhaps animating this film is a way for the filmmaker to cope with his own trauma. Through the sequences shown, it doesn’t feel like a forced live-action reenactment, it gives the air of conveying the true feelings of the people telling the story.
LikeLike
What struck me most about this film was that, though at first I thought it was about the massacre of Palestinians, there are essentially none present in the film. That’s because this film wasn’t about the killing of Palestinians; it is critical of war not because of the violence and tragedy that results from war, the devastation of civilians in particular, but about the emotional toll that war takes on soldiers. The director can say the words “women and children” as much as he likes, but ultimately it isn’t about them. It isn’t even about forcing the people who let the atrocity take places before their eyes, or Israel, face what was done to those women and children. After all, the film asserts that memory only takes a person where they want to go. It might ask how such a thing could take place, but it answers it by placing blame on Christian radicals, and highlighting the trauma of the soldiers. That trauma is valid, but where is the sense of accountability? The regret of onlookers is a recurring theme in history—why didn’t the world step in earlier in Germany, Rwanda?—but Israel wasn’t an onlooker in that war. Not even a little bit. Its military was occupying the region after invasion, sharing the city itself with its ally perpetrators, and further research reveals that the IDF blocked residents from leaving the camps at the request of the Phalanges the night of the massacre. And again, I ask: where are the Palestinians? Where is their suffering humanized, like the trauma of the Israeli soldiers? It even suggests that the director’s trauma is due not the suffering of the Palestinians, but of his parents’ and his people’s suffering in the Holocaust. Being an animated documentary, it has more freedom to illustrate the recollections and experiences on screen; why, then, is the experience of the Palestinian nothing more than an illustration of a gruesome sight, an expressionless sea of bodies? Perhaps the documentary shows them this way because the Israeli soldier just can’t connect with their suffering; many of the interviewees do mention blocking out horrors. But the film isn’t critical of this, and it doesn’t remind us that they did, in fact, suffer as humans, and that Israel was deeply involved in that, albeit in a politically complex war.
Also on my mind as I questioned the honesty of this film’s intent, or its carelessness towards human suffering, was whether perhaps the animated medium provided more honesty to the documentary genre than the supposedly objective cinematic lens. After all, the documentary footage at the end, meant to tether the massacre to reality, was somewhat deceptive in that it failed to show the humanity of the senselessly wailing (notably not subtitled) Palestinian woman in even half the empathetic light of the careful, thoughtful expressions of the animated Israeli soldiers.
LikeLike
What should the purpose of a documentary be? This question kept coming up while I was watching Waltz with Bashir. To me it seems that there are certain associations with truth and conscience that come with calling a film a documentary, namely that a documentary does not outright lie about what it investigates and, in my experience, it seems that documentaries are often calls to conscience. To this end, I have a few areas in which I was disappointed by why what otherwise was a beautifully crafted, thoughtful film.
One major thing that the film does not seem to really address, perhaps because the whole context of the event is so well known by its Israeli target audience. The Palestinian Liberation Organization withdrew in the days leading up to the massacre, and by the terms of the ceasefire to which it and Israel had agreed, Israel could not legally advance across West Beirut to reach Sabra and Shatila. Thus, though the film does document wonderfully the post-service struggle of a soldier who took part in an atrocity to understand the events that took place, its discussion of the politics of the war itself and the context of the occupation of the region omits a lot, or at least skimmed by it so quickly that I missed it despite being quite engrossed in the film.
Thus I am left with the question that I posed to start this response: what should the purpose of a documentary be? I can’t answer this question as I am no authority on such things, yet it seems that no documentary can tell the whole truth from all sides of an issue, though the best come close. Is it ok then that, as in the case of Waltz with Bashir, a film can make an appeal to conscience in regards to some events but withhold the entire truthful context and still be given the assumed mantle of truthfulness of documentary by the uneducated masses, such as myself, who cannot really say just what a documentary is?
LikeLike
Its very interesting to see how this film was both a blend of fiction and nonfiction. Thematically this matches up with the main protagonist wrestling with what is real and what isn’t real in his life too. Its hard for him to distinguish it and it really matches up earlier with what the other guy was saying about how when shown a photograph he places himself in it and a whole story is formed for that event, event though he wasn’t there.
***
It is always interesting to revisit films I watched in an academic setting. I get to view how far I’ve progressed as both a scholar and a student. The above was the response that I gave a year and a half ago for Waltz with Bashir in Prof. Koepnick’s Intro to Film and Media Studies course. To be frank, I was quite disappointed with my spelling errors and the lack of depth in my response. But brief as my response is, I still embrace the idea in my old response: the blurring of fiction and nonfiction. But to add on that, I want to connect the point to the medium/genre of animation and documentaries. I recall being confused as to why the director would present a subject that would commonly be tackled in a live-action objective documentary. But the truth of the matter is that documentaries still have someone behind the camera. What the director chooses to add or not add is still their choice. Consequently, documentaries can be just as subjective as a fictional film. So in using an animation, it would seem like animation is a whole hearted acceptance of the subjective and the abandonment of the objective. In animation, one can literally create their own images and move them at their own discretion and show their own subjective truth.
Additional: We all make our own subjective narratives in life. We see patterns in the events in our lives and we ourselves reign agency over what type of story this tells. This doesn’t make this truth any lesser than the objective truth because to whom do we owe the truth anyway. Who cares if he was never in the photograph, does the feelings and affect he feel from the photograph feel any diminished?
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