Ari Folman Research Articles

Exploring post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma in adult animation: a comprehensive analysis of Flee, Waltz witn Bashir and L'Image Manquante

Animation has been employed as a productive and subtle means to represent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and historical trauma. The aim of this article is to study the narrative, visual, and psycho-affective strategies of both phenomena through the films Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021), Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), and L'Image Manquante (Rithy Panh, 2013). The ability of animated images to reconstruct moments for which there is no visual testimony, as well as their capacity to evoke the experience of traumatic events, emerges as the center of a specific aesthetic approach to history, forming a type of cinema of the real (Zylberman, 2022). Contrary to the tradition of documentary and visual essay, there is a more frequent expressive use of evocative mechanisms, dreamlike images combined with archival material, and forms of re-enactment of real events that necessarily do not involve the use of actors. The evocation of painful experiences establishes a visual framework in which the viewer becomes the epicenter of the affective staging of trauma and PTSD, prioritizing poetic construction.

MEMORIES OF THE LEBANESE CIVIL WAR. AN ANALYSIS THROUGH THE WORKS OF JOANA HADJITHOMAS & KHALIL JOREIGE, AND THE FILM WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008), BY ARI FOLMAN

In this article we discuss a series of video installations and two films by Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, whose career together has been strongly marked by the images and memories of their country's recent history, especially those of the long Civil War (1975-1990), followed by an analysis of the film Waltz with Bashir by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, which is thematically related to one of the bloodiest episodes of that war and offers an interesting counterpoint. Before this approach, in order to better contextualise the works analysed, we begin with an introduction in which we try to recall in general terms some of the background, data and stages of that war, which also involved two other regional powers, and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation).

Ari Folman’s Made in Israel (2001): Traces of Trauma in the Israeli Cinema Landscape

In the Israeli collective memory, the Yom Kippur’s battles in the Golan Heights have become synonymous with a long lasting national scar that fails to disappear. Interestingly, until the release of Yaron Zilberman’s recent television series Valley of Tears (She’at Ne’Ila, 2020), this war, which was traditionally associated with the pictured northern landscape, had appeared in few documentaries, but was almost absent from Israeli feature films. This article analyzes one of the very few attempts to deal with this memory, Ari Folman’s feature film Made in Israel (2001). Using a science fiction narrative structure, Folman adopts historian Anita Shapira’s contention about the link between this war and the Holocaust, because both confronted the Jewish people with its fear of extermination. His narrative invites the viewer to participate imaginatively in a road movie set against the snow-covered landscapes of the Golan Heights, where a number of hitmen attempt to catch the last surviving Nazi and bring him to trial in Jerusalem. Interestingly, what begins as a Zionist mission in the hegemonic spaces of the State of Israel gradually transforms into various European landscapes as the snow piles up and the Nazi feels increasingly at home.

Ecstatic (re)constructions: The creative practice in animated documentary

This study explores non-fiction animation as a creative practice. It specifically engages with practitioners’ creative intervention and their reconstruction of the world we inhabit as human beings. Beyond artistic and expressive illustration, animated documentary strives towards an augmented representation of real narratives. Such a representation demands a felicitous approach from the practitioner/s for a heightened evocation of emotions, as in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and Nina Sabnani’s Tanko Bole Chhe (The Stitches Speak). I examine these two animated documentaries, and my investigation offers in-depth analyses of the practitioners’ engagement with memory and reconstruction. I employ Aumont and Marie’s (1988) film analysis method, especially the iconic analysis technique, followed by the filmmakers’ insights to understand the embedded characteristics of the filmmakers’ creative approach. I argue that the practitioner is central to the practice of eliciting emotions embodying animated subjective testimonies and manifestations. In addition, the practitioner–subject association is inclusive in the practice and evokes an affective exposition of the narratives through the creative narrative design in the animated documentary.

Remembrance of Things in Past: History and Memory in the Graphic NovelWaltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story

This article attempts to read Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s graphic war manifesto Waltz with Bashir (2008) as an example of postmodern historiography on the 1982 invasion of Beirut through the lens of a soldier’s (read Folman’s) traumatic memory. Through its universal critique of war, the text probes the problematic ways in which memory and traumatic lived realities interact to create narratives that subvert populist/national discourses. Folman’s amnesiac memory, which refuses to uphold a linear progression of the past, brings before the reader/viewer dual textual registers of identity formation (through Folman’s coming to terms with his repressed memories as a soldier in Lebanon) within the attempted counter-narrative against totalitarian histories. The article looks at how Folman’s amnesiac memory becomes a tool through which an ‘individual’ subjective history is birthed—thus giving rise to a reverse bildungsroman—within the contours of a counter-narrative on the national history of Israel’s war in Lebanon. Finally, in positing history as a project against totalitarianism, the article attempts to question what constitutes historicity: Is it the facticity of past events that determines their actual value? If so, what does it bode for a post-truth, polysemiotic world?

Bearing Witness in Analog and Digital Witness Films: Ethical Aesthetics in Shoah [1985] and Waltz with Bashir [2008

In the ongoing and passionate debates over the digitalization of visual media, many questions about the ontology or materiality of the new digital image have been raised. Analog representation is often thought of in terms of indexicality and sometimes a naive belief in the truthfulness of the photographic image, whereas the digital image is, in a way, no longer an image anymore, but a set of data in flux, superficially coded and easy to manipulate. The following article examines how this shift to digitalization affects the ethical genre per se: the witness film. In a film analytical close reading of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, resonances become visible to psychoanalysis, Deleuzian film philosophy and the debates over the materiality of the analog and digital image. Lanzmann draws on a specific kind of indirect indexicality, which is highly interested in the psychic and embodied realities of surviving, witnessing and the passing of time, whereas Folman develops a politics of the powers of the false: truthfulness, accessibility and memorability are abolished in favor of false images, screen-memories and traumatic mis/representation, which are staged noticeably digital and altered, revolving around the impossibility to grasp the ungraspable.

Evaluating animentary’s potential as a rhetorical genre

Multimodality scholarship has hitherto mainly focused on the combination of static visuals and written language (see Bateman et al., Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis -- A Problem-Oriented Introduction, 2017; Tseronis and Forceville, Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres, 2017; and Forceville, ‘Multimodality’, in press, for discussion and bibliographies). However, drawing on visuals, written language, spoken language, music and sound, film is a multimodal medium par excellence. In this article, the authors specifically focus on documentary film. Documentary can be considered to be the cinematic equivalent of audiovisual rhetorical discourse, aiming to persuade its envisaged audience of something. Obviously, it is crucial for the credibility of documentaries that they are seen as indexically rooted in reality. But, recently, documentary film has witnessed the flourishing of a subgenre that may seem to challenge this indexicality: the ‘animentary’ – a documentary that consists to a considerable extent of animated images. While the completely constructed nature of animation means that animentaries’ indexical relation between audiovisual representation and represented world is loosened, or even absent, animentaries also – and importantly – enable perspectives on reality that live-action documentary cannot. This article analyses how the visual, verbal, sonic and musical modes function rhetorically in four feature-length animentaries that share the theme of ‘war’: Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman, 2008), 25 April (dir. Leanne Pooley, 2015), Chris the Swiss (dir. Anja Kofmel, 2018) and Another Day of Life (dir. Raúl de la Fuente and Damian Nenow, 2019). The authors conclude that the written and spoken verbal modes play a crucial role in safeguarding animentaries’ referential relation to reality.

W świecie kolorowej (anty)utopii. O animowanych cyborgach w Kongresie Ariego Folmana


 
 
 The article focuses on pointing out the functions of using animation technique and elements of the science fiction genre in Ari Folman’s The Congress from 2013. The film, which is loosely based on the short story The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem, balances on the edge of various genres, using the techniques of both live action film and computer animation. Folman proposes a glamorous, colorful vision of an (anti)utopian future, in which pharmacologically-modified cyborg-people participate in a collective hallucination, which is an alternative reality to the post-apocalyptic real world. The director makes several significant changes to the original, thanks to which he introduces a universal message and asks questions which seem far more relevant in the context of both contemporary culture and the environmental crisis that can no longer be ignored (although the issue of an impending natural disaster was also important in Lem’s works).
 
 

Ari Folman’s promises of technological mediation in The Congress

Ari Folman’s promises of technological mediation in The Congress

Studying anti-Semitism using primary sources in graphic novels

Recent trends in history education have emphasized the study of primary sources as an important conduit for fostering critical and historical thinking skills and for allowing students to assume the role of historians. In the following article, I examine the ways that Nora Krug’s Belonging, Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s Anne Frank’s Diary and Will Eisner’s The Plot, all meaningfully engage with primary sources as a central feature of the graphic novel. Each of the texts addresses a different aspect of historical anti-Semitism but through the use of visual and textual devices that are woven into the primary sources, connections to contemporary society abound. Furthermore, what also emerges with these three texts is an active engagement with the reader wherein the primary sources are used to demand that the reader thinks about historical and contemporary anti-Semitism. Therefore, these three texts do not simply include primary sources but, like effective history educators, they model and foster critical and historical thinking through the visual and textual prompts. Their inclusion turns the reader into an active historian who participates in the process of discovery and arrives at their own understanding of the perniciousness of anti-Semitism throughout history and its continued presence in their own communities.

Witnessing the perpetrator: testimony and accountability in current Israeli documentary film

ABSTRACT The article critically examines the ethical stance taken by two Israeli documentary films dealing with perpetrator-victim positions: Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Avi Mograbi's Z32 (2008). These films, we argue, are seeking for new aesthetic strategies of representing past traumatic events as well as critically and innovatively exploring the ethical position of the perpetrator. At the same time, these films challenge the traditional distinctions between documentary and fiction, reference and representation. The films seek, both aesthetically and ethically, to raise questions regarding the representation of the perpetrator during the First Lebanon War and the Second Intifada without offering a redemptive narrative for Israelis. Through their use of testifiers and testimonies these documentary films challenge the traditional opposed positions of victim/perpetrator.

Figures of Memory

Artikelbeginn:[English title and abstract below] Als global bekanntes Erinnerungsnarrativ nimmt Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank (erste deutsche Fassung 1950) einen bedeutenden Part in der Holocaust Education ein. Dabei beteiligt sich die grafische Adaption von Ari Folmans und David Polonskys Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank. Graphic Diary (2017) auf zweierlei Art am Fortschreiben des kulturellen Gedächtnisses; einerseits in seiner Geformtheit durch die Publikation selbst und darüber hinaus in seiner Organisiertheit aufgrund der institutionalisierten Kommunikation (vgl. Assmann 1988, S. 12). Figures of MemoryAnne Frank’s Diary between Text and Image, Word and Symbol Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Interpretation by Ari Folman and David Polonsky (2017) is a recent addition to a sequence of editions that have shaped the perception of Anne Frank’s story. At the same time, the ethics and aesthetics of remembrance have been consistently discussed. These discussions have been fueled by discourses on memory as well as by the reimagination of the past by new generations. As Marianne Hirsch states »Postmemory’s connection to the past is [...] actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation« (Hirsch 2012). Ari Folman and David Polonsky work with those imaginative approaches and reshape historical events on the visual and the verbal narrative levels. As with Waltz with Bashir (2009), on which Folman and Polonsky collaborated successfully as author and illustrator, Anne Frank’s Diary is also an extraordinary testimony of war based on extensive research. Intermedial references, such as historical photographs, documentaries and journal entries add authenticity to Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Interpretation and lead the reader on a journey back in time. This article discusses the relationship between the visual representation of memory in the Diary and how it goes about narrating the story, and it examines this graphic novel’s potential for shaping and reshaping the reader’s perception of history.

A National Reckoning: Israeli Soldiers’ Depictions of Wartime Trauma in Autobiographical Graphic Novels

The following paper analyses Ari Folman’s 2009 graphic novel Waltz with Bashir and Galit and Gilad Seliktar’s short graphic narrative ‘Houses’. Each presents a visualization of an Israeli soldier forced to bear witness to a morally compromising event during their mandatory national service. The texts, while written within the last decade, depict wars from the 1980s and 1990s. Their narratives differ from the state-sanctioned versions of Israel’s military as an army that always behaves morally. The works present an alternate narrative in which, at times, Israeli soldiers are expected to participate in immoral actions and that there is a lasting on their mental health. Additionally, when considered together, the two paint a portrait of an Israeli society that has not adequately responded to the strained emotions of segments of its population or found ways to bring these soldiers’ feelings of self-doubt and self-recrimination into the national narrative of wartime experiences.

Animation in the Core of Dystopia: Ari Folman’s The Congress

Ari Folman’s The Congress (2013) borrows freely from Stanisław Lem’s dystopian view in his Sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress (1971) to propose the gradual dissolution of the human into an artificial form, which is animation. By moving the action of the novel from a hypothetical future to contemporary Hollywood, Ari Folman gives CGI animation the role of catalyst for changes not only in the production system, but for human thought and, therefore, for society. This way, the film ponders the changing role of performers at the time of their digitalization, as well as on the progressive dematerialization of the film industry, considering a dystopian future where simulation fatally displaces reality, which invites relating The Congress with Jean Baudrillard’s and Alan Cholodenko’s theses on how animating technologies have resulted in the culture of erasing. Moreover, this article highlights how Lem’s metaphor of the manipulation of information in the Soviet era is transformed in the second part of The Congress into a vision of cinema as a collective addiction, relating it to Alexander Dovzhenko’s and Edgar Morin’s speculative theories of total film – which come close to the potentialities of today’s Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. In addition, although The Congress is a disturbing view of film industry and animating technologies, its vision of film is nostalgically retro as it vindicates an entire tradition of Golden Age animation that transformed the star system into cartoons, suggesting the fictionalization of their lives and establishing a postmodern continuum between animation and film.

Mapping Orientalist Discourses: Using Waltz with Bashir in the Classroom

Abstract While fiction and non-fiction productions can be used as tools to observe, describe, and analyze the “world-out-there,” within these events-issues centered approaches post-positivists posit films themselves as “cultural artifacts” to be analyzed. This paper proposes a critical analysis of Waltz with Bashir (2008) to be conducted with students in the classroom. This acclaimed animated film by Israeli writer and director Ari Folman depicting the 1982 Lebanon War is a non-obvious but germane example of Said's “Orientalism.” After explaining post-structuralism and post-orientalist stances on subjectivity, power relations, and the political consequences of the narratives we create, we analyze the film by applying an orientalist grid to Waltz with Bashir and raising qualitative questions to foster the student's criticality. We conclude by examining student's reactions to the film and their understanding of “Orientalism.”

Post/Documentary

From John Grierson’s influential early definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” through documentary studies’ reconstruction of the multitude of existing forms to philosophers’ attempts to develop comprehensive accounts of documentary as a specific kind of nonfiction film, the concept of documentary has been both fiercely contested and, through these debates, continuously expanded to refer to an ever more extensive corpus of works. By now, there is a broad consensus that documentary film as a genre cannot be reduced to supposedly “objective” recordings of the “actual world,” as both various kinds of reenactments and sometimes radical forms of subjectivity have (yet again) become well-established elements of many documentary films. However, it would seem that summarily treating “hybrid” documentary films, “animated documentaries,” and “documentary games” as nothing but the most recent chapter of the history of documentary occludes more than it illuminates. Instead, this article proposes to examine “animated documentaries” such as Chicago 10: Say Your Peace (Brett Morgen, 2007) or Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) and “documentary games” such as JFK Reloaded (Traffic Games, 2004) or The Cat and the Coup (Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad, 2011) through the lens of post/documentary, thus emphasizing not just their semiotic but also their occasionally rather complex referential multimodality.

Todo individuo es colectivo: ¿cómo podemos salvar el futuro del cine?

In today’s audiovisual ecosystem, one of the recurring themes is that of drug use. The Congress (dir. Ari Folman, 2014) is a film that deals on this topic in a particular way, by offering a reflection from science-fiction on the relation between individual, drugs and society in a movie about the future of cinema. This text presents an analysis of this piece, taking categories from the psychoanalytic theory of cinema proposed by Slavoj Žižek (suture, Real, interface), reflections from futurologist Jacques Attali, and some ideas from Marxism and clinical psychoanalysis to establish the importance of saving cinematographic process from collectivity instead of the exaltation of individual experience.

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

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...

Forms of Mediation in Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir

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...

Between Two Hills: From <em>Hill 24</em> to <em>Beaufort</em> and the Question of the Political in Israeli Cinema

In the second half of the 1990s and the early part of the 2000s, Israeli filmmakers tended to focus on family dramas, all but eschewing the social and political themes that dominatedt Israeli cinema in the preceding two decades. Perhaps in reaction to the Rabin assassination and the terror attacks of the 1990s, which intensified during the Second Intifada, the cinematic gaze seemed to have turned from the battlefi eld to the home as the site of dramatic tension. Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort (2007), which deals with the Israeli pullout from Lebanon in 2000, followed by two other films that dealt with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Shmuel Maoz’s Lebanon (2009), may have signaled Israeli filmmakers’ renewed interest in the political realm as a sphere of change. By comparing these films to early Israeli war films, namely Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), this article seeks to assess whether the new direction heralded by Beaufort does indeed indicate a turn toward the political realm or whether these films in fact continue the apolitical trend of recent Israeli cinema.