Forms of Mediation in Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir

Abstract

Forms of Mediation in Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir Donato Loia (bio) You have to take care of yourself: it is you who takes care; and then you take care of something which is the same thing as yourself, [the same thing] as the subject who "takes care," this is your self as object. —Michel Foucault 1 Introduction Scholars of film studies and trauma studies have dedicated much thinking to Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Israeli director Ari Folman. 2 The animated film is based on Folman's participation as an Israeli soldier in the 1982 Lebanon war. The movie's main character, Folman himself, attempts to remember—twenty-four years later—repressed memories from the war. The most significant repressed experiences haunting the character are the Sabra and Shatila massacres, where the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia murdered more than 1,700 Palestinians while the Israel Defense Forces provided military cover for the Phalangists. This essay will not discuss the degree of involvement of the Israeli Defense Force in the massacres nor will it consider the issues of perpetrator trauma or the Palestinian response the movie. 3 Instead, this essay examines Waltz with Bashir as a reflection on the possibility of mediating or repressing a traumatic memory. The movie begins with Folman revealing to a friend, haunted by recurring war dreams, that he has no flashbacks or memories from the war. However, that same night, Folman experiences his first flashback from the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The flashback, which recurs multiple times throughout the movie, and shows Folman and his comrades emerging [End Page 91] naked out of a body of water and walking toward a bombed city, triggers his desire to better understand his role and experiences. The vision always ends with Palestinian women, seemingly crying, running toward the group of men walking toward the city (fig. 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, 2008, still. The rest of the movie shows Folman carrying out a series of interviews with friends and various professionals who were involved in the Lebanon war, including a psychiatrist, a journalist, and an army general. Ohad Landesman and Roy Bendor point out that "while the interviews were recorded faithfully in clean high fidelity sound, their filmed footage was used only as a visual reference to inspire the animation (which was not rotoscoped, but made entirely from scratch)." 4 The film combines interview scenes with flashbacks from the war, including the one mentioned above that appears again in the movie's final scene. However, in the final scene, the vision continues after the women run toward the soldiers. After the camera zooms in for a few seconds on a closeup on Folman's face, the camera cuts to a reverse shot of live action footage of the crying women. Audiences hear—for the first time in the film—the crying women's voices, initially superimposed on the animation, then as part of the live footage. The women are crying and screaming in Arabic, "My son, my son!"; "Take photos! Take photos!"; and "Where are the [End Page 92] Arabs, where are the Arabs?" The live action footage shows the trucidated bodies of women, men, and children. The curly hair of a child appears among the debris. Then, the film ends. Waltz with Bashir has often been treated as a documentary. The International Documentary Association awarded it as the best feature-length film in 2008, and the Writers Guild of America awarded it Best Documentary in 2009. The critical reception of the movie, says Giulia Miller, "has retrospectively caused it to be redefined as 'animated documentary'." 5 This paper is unconcerned with issues of categorizations. 6 One of the crucial issues for Waltz with Bashir, and for us here, is to comprehend the relationship between memory and representation—or more precisely, the possibility of expressing a traumatic event through an emotional and critical intertwinement of documentary sources and animation. I will say more about this point later on, but it is necessary to clarify here that to express a traumatic event does not mean to explain, to justify, or to comprehend that event. By possibility of expressing...