On Miller's <em>Studying Waltz with Bashir</em>

Abstract

On Miller’s Studying Waltz with Bashir Dan Chyutin Studying Waltz with Bashir. By Giulia Miller. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2017. 111 pp., ISBN 9-781911-325154, US $15.00. Israeli cinema has experienced unprecedented success on the global stage in recent years, with many fiction and documentary films winning prizes at major festivals and receiving widespread international distribution. Of these films, arguably none have had a greater impact, not just on Israeli film history but on film history in general, than Ari Folman’s 2008 “animated documentary” Waltz with Bashir: a film which recounts the filmmaker’s attempt to recall his experiences as an Israeli Defense Forces soldier during the First Lebanon War, specifically the Sabra and Shatila massacre (1982). Testament to this noteworthy impact may be found in the recent publication of Giulia Miller’s concise volume on the film, one in a series of comparable monographs published by Auteur and dedicated primarily to notable contemporary cinematic works (including Chungking Express [Wong Kar-wai, 1994], Fight Club [David Fincher, 1999], The Matrix [The Wachowskis, 1999], Talk to Her [Pedro Almodóvar, 2002], and Pan’s Labyrinth [Guillermo del Toro, 2006]). To be included in such an illustrious list seems to go a long way in responding to one of Miller’s guiding questions: “Is [Waltz with Bashir] as significant now as it was when it was first released?” (8). More than providing proof to such significance, however, the author appears particularly interested in breaking down its causes, as they relate to features she considers “unique to Waltz [End Page 102] with Bashir” (17): in particular, the film’s reliance on documentary and animation techniques, its manipulations of story chronology and their effects, its relationship to the Holocaust and the Conflict, its intertextual references to non–Israeli War cinema, and its negotiation between “local” meaning and “universal” appeal. Following a brief introduction (which includes a synopsis and some production context), the chapters mobilize the aforementioned features to provide a comprehensive account that “get[s] to the heart of Waltz with Bashir” (105). The first of these tackles arguably the most hotly discussed aspect of the film—its status as an “animated documentary.” In this context, Miller notes the discrepancy between the fact that the film was not initially promoted as a documentary and the overwhelming desire of critics to define it as such, over and against its potential conceptualization as animated fiction. The appellation “documentary” is evoked, according to the writer, in response to Folman’s use of interviews with real-life figures, orchestrated around “a well-meaning quest for truth” (26 [emphasis added]). In certain respects this term, at least in the mode of “interactive documentary,” does not neatly fit Waltz with Bashir, whose interviews are hypercontrived (and occasionally substitute the voices of actual interviewees with those of actors), as is its quest for truth, which in lieu of “a confused Folman, . . . is really showing Folman pretending to be confused” (30). This leads Miller to foreground the role of animation in the text, especially its highlighting of subjectivity, its ahistorical “presentness,” and its general fictiveness. The discrepancy between the film’s chronologies of story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet) form the center of the next chapter. Here Miller first points to Folman’s choice to show interviewees in their current state before going into their flashbacks, arguing that the reason behind this strategy is “to emphasize the link between present day Israeli trauma and Israeli army experience during the First Lebanon War” (49). The erasure of the intervening period between the war and the present supports the overall disjointedness of the plot ordering, which in turn allows us to perceive the whole film as an expression of a traumatic mind-set. This understanding of the filmic structure as “traumatic,” for Miller, raises questions as to its desired function and effect. Is Waltz with Bashir really meant to provide historical insight, even in the limited context of Israeli culpability to the massacre? Or is it set up as a form of therapy, allowing characters and audience members to come to terms with their war trauma(s)? These questions pertain directly to Waltz with Bashir’s position on war and its relationship...