"Waltz With Bashir"

A BEAUTIFUL FILM ILLUSTRATES THE UGLINESS OF WAR

“Waltz With Bashir” has won several awards and an Ophir, Israel’s equivalent of an Oscar, was awareded a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and has been nominated for this year’s Academy Award also for Best Foreign Language Film.

Though the events illustrated in Israeli director and filmmaker Ari Folman’s extraordinary, animated documentary film, “Waltz With Bashir,” occurred in 1982, in Lebanon, they are timely, considering Israel’s recent unleashing of its US backed war machine on Palestinians in Gaza, today. Folman made his film in collaboration with art director David Polansky, and director of animation, Yori Goodman. Polansky and Goodman animate Folman’s narrative mostly in subdued tones, but also in saturated, surreal colors, and with the oblique, disorienting angles of a German expressionist film.
Some scenes could’ve been taken directly from recent debacles that made it to television screens or in documentary films on Iraq and Afghanistan. If anything, “Waltz With Bashir,” illustrates the truism of the futility of war, that war never changes anything. War destroys property, kills millions of people, and wounds as many if not more, both physically and mentally.
The film opens with a frightening, almost 3-D scene of the animated character of Folman being chased by exactly twenty-six, slathering, yellow-eyed, Doberman Pinchers. This is a recurring nightmare he has suffered for decades. Folman had been a soldier in the Israeli Army in 1982 when, under General Ariel Sharon, the Israeli army, IDF, attacked the Palestinians in Lebanon. He claims he doesn’t remember being in Beirut during the massacres of civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps of Shabra and Shatila, carried out by a Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia to avenge the assassination of their Lebanese president, Bashir Gemayel. He decides to talk to former soldiers, who either knew about the slaughter or remembered being there with him. He also consults with psychiatrists about retrieving twenty-year-old repressed memories.
The former soldiers Ari interviews (shown in animation) are middle-age, and live comfortable lives as wine-makers, educators, doctors, or journalists. In the making of the film, all but two spoke in their own voices. With their help, Folman begins to remembers firing flares that illuminated the night sky, providing the Phalangists enough light to execute their night-long slaughter. His memories reveal the horrors of war and the weight of his guilt. He and the other soldiers are bothered by the stupidity of all that evil. Ari wonders how he could’ve allowed himself to be a part of it. Some of his memories come to him as breathtakingly beautiful hallucinations: Under palm trees on a beach, playing volleyball, listening to rock music, drinking, smoking weed - - scenes reminiscent of film clips of American soldiers partying in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palace. One of Ari’s hallucination shows him lying prone on the stomach of a nude giantess backstroking through a calm sea, as flames from bombed ships light up the sky. Another is of a tropical paradise with helicopters roaring overhead that could’ve been an animation of the surfing scene in Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” I kept waiting for Duvall’s famous napalm line.

Some scenes are like a swift kick in the gut. The raw recruits have been ordered to “shoot anything that moves.” They land on a beach, Normandy-style, and flop down in the sand, automatic rifles ready. These are baby-face boys, not much older than nineteen; eyes wide with the fear of the unexpected. .A broken down Mercedes sedan rattles up to the beach. They’ve been told that Palestinian terrorists deliver bombs in cars. Panicked, the boys start shooting. The car jumps and bounces with each strike, as the driver tries to pull away. The car tattles, groans and settles like a dying beast. Then all is quiet. The soldiers approach gingerly, and see unrecognizable bloody ribbons of flesh that were once human beings. As has been shown in film clips of US soldiers in Iraq, “Waltz” also includes scenes of Israeli soldiers walking down the streets of Beirut randomly shooting at everything, pock-marking buildings, reducing vehicles to bullet ridden hulks, as civilians scatter in all directions, and bodies are left on the street.
There was a question at the time as to whether Ariel Sharon knew of the massacre. Sharon had spent months planning the war. He had met secretly with Lebanese Christian Phalangist allies whom he planned to help install as Lebanon's government once the PLO was out of Beirut. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) asked Phalangist militiamen to enter refugee camps, Shabra and Shatila. The militia subsequently massacred civilians inside. It was argued that the Israelis should have known that this could occur, considering Gemayel’s assassination only two days before, and taking into account the on-going animosity between the Palestinians and the Phalangists. Ariel Sharon’s culpability is illustrated in the film in a scene showing an Israeli military officer calling “Arik” (Sharon’s nickname) at his ranch, to ask him if he knew of the massacre. He answers, laconically, in the positive.

After the war, the Israeli government had set up the Kahan Commission to investigate. It subsequently found Israel responsible, but only indirectly. The Commission stated that Israeli commanders should have been aware of the possibility of a revenge attack. They also found Sharon personally responsible for not only "ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge," but also for "not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed." It recommended his resignation as head of the Defense Ministry. After first resisting, Sharon finally stepped down.

Comments on the film from some Arab blogs are positive. However, one blogger wondered why Arabs couldn’t make something similar. Another felt that Folman's film gives no answers In an interview, Folman told the JTA (The Global News Service of the Jewish People) he always intended to make “Waltz with Bashir” as an animated film.
“When you look at everything that there is in this film -- lost memory, memories of war, which are probably the most surreal things on earth, dreams, subconscious, drugs, hallucination - - it was the only way to combine one fluid storyline,” he said. “If it was a classic documentary, it would have shown middle-aged men telling their war experiences and it would have to be covered with footage that you could never find and wouldn’t come close to resembling what they went through. It would be a boring film. And if you made a big action movie with the budget of an Israeli movie, that would just be sad.” Which may explain why US films on Iraq have failed at the box office.

In another view, Natalie Rothschild wrote on the Website JEWCY, in December 2008, that Folman’s film, though beautifully rendered and artfully scripted, is a big narcissistic mea culpa, a “spectre that haunts post-Zionist Israeli society.” She calls the film, “Post-Zionist Stress Disorder.” She stated that though Folman believes his film is apolitical, it “conveys a disturbingly skewed account” of the war. Folman, she says, feels the IDF soldiers were ”victims of circumstance,” and that the film “is not only incredibly self-obsessed, it is also a striking evasion of responsibility.” She also quotes Folman on the atrocity as believing that the Christian Phalangist militiamen were fully responsible and that the Israeli soldiers had nothing to do with it. Rothschild says that yes, as a 19 year old conscript, he could say he was following orders, but now, as an adult, he “could recognize that several parties hold responsibility for what happened

The final scene of “Waltz”” shows Folman standing before the shrieking, grief-stricken Palestinian women, leaving the camps, and we see that he finally recognizes his part in the massacre. The horror is made real when the film segues from animation to archival footage of the devastated survivors of the camps. As the camera moves over the rubble, one is sickened by the corpses of brutally slaughtered men, women, and children. Perhaps Folman’s film attests to his and the perpetrators guilt, however, it may offer atonement, as well.”

This review will appear also in an adaptated form in the February issue of Socialist Action News.