The film narrates of director Ari Folman’s experiences during the war in Lebanon set in the 80’s, but the thing is, he does not remember most of them as he served the military at a rather young age of 19. As such, he interviews his fellow veterans in the war and visualizes their experiences into a rather interesting technique not very common in documentaries, which is through animation.
Although we usually associate animation with films or series that portray a rather soft or child-friendly theme, the animations done in this film showcase otherwise. The film is rated R for such explicit disturbing themes of massacre and genocide that happened during the war (particularly at the end where it, unfiltered, shows newsreel footage of dead bodies piled up and survivors sobbing and weeping over them), cartoon violence as scenes show of killing people with blood present, and most of all, which stands out to me among all scenes, the graphic sequence of pornography on a TV where viewers of the film watch it as if on an actual pornographic site. One can only imagine how more impactful this film can be if such explicit themes were done in live-action.
According to Folman in an interview with Terry Gross in his talk show Fresh Air, the film is “totally autobiographical”, that “all the things that are told in the film are true in the manner, as much as documentary filmmaking can be true or objective”, and with regards to animation, in Folman’s opinion, “it doesn’t make it less true in my mind”, he says. The director also adds that in animation, it is “the only way to go from one dimension to another, from dreams to reality”, pertaining to Gross’s question if the film could have been done in any other way.
This documentary film is a combination of expository, participatory, and most of all, performative modes. It is expository, in that it makes use of illustrations and animations and that the filmmaker seeks to know what happened during the Lebanon War with the help of his close friends and fellow comrades who served during the war. It is participatory as Folman himself engages with his interviewees in conversation about their experiences, as shown through their animated selves. But above all, it is a performative one for the most part, as the director involves himself fully in this documentary—that is, being a war veteran, he gets to tell his story although with the help of the personalities whom he interviews. Folman gives viewers a perspective of “what it’s like to be there” on a world, a culture or an event in history (Biesterfeld, P.).
The movie’s title, Waltz with Bashir, provides a subtext in itself. It refers to this very scene roughly one hour in the film wherein Shmuel Frenkel, one of the soldiers of whom the director Folman interviews, grabs another soldier’s machine gun and circles around while firing it continuously amid enemy forces’ bullets coming from all directions; as he fires the gun twirling around, the bullets likewise hit the humongous image of Bashir Gemayel as well as other images of him plastered everywhere. The waltz likewise alludes to the Israelis’ relationship with the Christians, their allies, “that was kind of a dance we did with them that ended up in a very tragic way,” according to Folman in an interview with Gross.
The film affects me in a way that such events can just be forgotten if one decides to dissociate him/herself from what happened, even in impactful and otherwise traumatic scenarios. But eventually, at some point in life, one will get to try to remember such events and become curious about a particular happening by asking some people to visualize from memory what they have remembered, as the human mind, by nature, is not capable of visualizing each and every single detail of the past, and that visions may just be hallucinations, as Folman’s therapist friend has said. The film shows how memory can distort the truth (Ansen, D.).
REFERENCES
Ansen, D. (2010, March 13). “Waltz with Bashir” review. Retrieved March 01, 2021, from https://www.newsweek.com/waltz-bashir-review-84789
Biesterfeld, P. (2020, November 05). The six primary types of documentaries. Retrieved March 01, 2021, from https://www.videomaker.com/article/c06/18423-six-primary-styles-of-documentary-production
Dancing with Memory, massacre in ‘bashir’. (2008, December 23). Retrieved March 01, 2021, from https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98634515
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