Waltz With Bashir: Review/ Reccomendation

     

         There is something very Waking Life about Ari Folman and David Polonsky's film and subsequent graphic novel Waltz With Bashir (2008) about the massacres of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War. The Tel Aviv Israeli director-illustrator team use the comic form to explore how a soldier seeks to understand his responsibility in the massacre when his unit failed to intervene. As in Waking Life, Waltz With Bashir uses the exaggeration and glossing implicit in the illustrative form to mimic how imagination and representation shape and often compromise human memory and experience.

        The story is autobiographical and features Ari Folman, a 19-year old Israeli soldier and also as a middle-aged man looking back on his youth. It begins as Ari Sr. is jolted awake by a dream of rabid dogs invading a city- dogs just like those he shot in Lebanon to prevent the detection of his unit. After this vision Ari realizes that he had long ago suffered amnesia and lost his memory of the war. He then attempts to reconstruct the large holes in his memory by interviewing his long lost compatriots. 
       The narrative follows Ari as he seeks out his memory and re-discovers his moral culpability in the war. Perhaps this feature is why the story is compared to Vonnegut's dystopian teenage classic, Slaughterhouse 5, which follows a similar digression from flashbacks to the present. But over the course of most novels, the accumulation of details helps the reader become more familiar with how the characters see the world. This is not how Waltz With Bashir works. The reader can't really 'get' Bashir, because Bashir begins as an amnesiac and ends up rejecting the experience he went through which he discovered from those he interview. As it were, with each new discovery about himself, he puts off considering before having more information. 
        Folman's struggle works as a metaphor for the system of public memory-making; intensely broken, full of holes, but constantly wrangling for more images, and images that will affirm the need for more information before the story is complete...which might just be never. 
         In Waking Life and Waltz With Bashir the existential predilections of the protagonist are complimented by the comic form- which distorts the landscape, faces, and operative functions of humans as if to remark on our lack of observation and comprehension of our surroundings. In Waking Life, this effect precipitates a new-agey spiritualism that supports creative imagination and solidarity over the inability of our bodies to express the self.  In Waltz With Bashir the comic form rules a decisive color palate and a mixture of photorealistic illustrations of flames and nightclub lights. Folman's flashbacks mimic the views from military goggles, headlamps, and tank telescopes. In this way, his memory comes to him in the form of images which mimic technological lenses--- as if he will never know which are his memories, which are constructed by his compatriots, and which have a place in his head because of the national and mass media. The landscape is distorted, the body, and the mind, all distorted by the detachment of the telescopic gaze.
       Waltz With Bashir also implicates the problems of using interviews to reconstruct war memory. The content of Folman's interview with his fellow soldier Carmi in Holland hits upon this issue. Carmi bursts, "It's funny. Just before you showed up, my son Thomas went out to play with a plastic rifle. While he was playing he started asking questions: What did I do in the army, did I ever shoot anyone." "Did you?" "I don't know...With all the pressure and the fear we start shooting like maniacs, I have no idea at what." For one, it seems that the act of shooting into unknown space prevents an individual from knowing what they are individually responsible for and causes a skewing of memory and a projection of guilt onto all when the event is remembered. In this way, the question of what an individual is responsible for is almost too fraught to ask. No less, Carmi's statement also makes it clear that individual memories of war are skewed by expectations at home. Because it might pain his child to hear that daddy killed someone, or vice versa might make the kid unreasonably excited----- an ex-soldier might have to fudge his retelling of the story to make his service more digestible. 

          Ostensibly, Folman was a member of the Israel Defense Forces that assisted in the massacre unknowingly but failed to stop the killing of hundreds civilians once it was clear what was going on. Ari says in the narrative:

 "They were going in to purge the camps of Palestinian terrorists...And we were their cover...After that we'd take control...All night we heard shooting from the camps, and the sky was lit with flares...The next morning they started bringing out the civilians...A long row of people was led out of the camps by the phalangists...The command center was located behind us, about one hundred yards away, on top of a very tall building where they could look down and see everything. They probably had a better view than I did."

 Ari Folman's (Folman the director, and the protagonist, I suppose) intimate engagement with his own biography is nothing short of amazing. His mourning of lost memory is realistically coupled with a desire to keep trauma hidden and indiscreet. But in writing, producing a film, and printing comic versions of Waltz With Bashir, he further turns his memory into an interpretive commodity and a tool that can be used to both inform us about the Lebanon War and the massacre, and about the flaws in media memory making.

The Graphic Novel Cover

Massacre of Palestinians in Shatila, 1982

Edward Said on the US's Predilection for Israel

     
       I recently found out that the academic demi-god of many undergraduates, Edward Said is also a tour-de-force commentator on media-politics in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Said is most widely known for his book Orientalism (1978) which is foundational in post-colonial studies and explores how Western academic scholarship and the popular media have created a feedback institutional structure backing narratives of Western power and intellectual superiority over Africa, the Orient, and the Middle East since the 19th century. Though Said himself is a Palestinian American, his stance is not anti-Israeli. He argues that Palestine has been ill depicted because of the anti-Islamic, anti-Arab leanings of American foreign policy and the American news media---and he advocates for journalism about the Israel/ Palestine conflict that focuses on human experience and reckons with the future from the micro rather than the macro level.

        In a new hotblooded essay, Said asks readers to consider how the media canons in Israel and in the States are engaged in efforts to convince us to support Israeli Zionists with impunity over Palestinians. I highly advise that you read the article in completion because Said is keen on describing the ins and outs of various types of propaganda- whether guerrilla or mainstream, public or international. From the article: 

       Israel has already poured hundreds of millions of dollars into what in Hebrew is called hasbara, or information  for the outside world (hence, propaganda). This has included an entire range of efforts: lunches and free trips for influential journalists; seminars for Jewish university students who over a week in a secluded country estate can be primed to "defend" Israel on the campus; bombarding congressmen and -women with invitations and visits; pamphlets and, most important, money for election campaigns; directing (or, as the case requires, harassing) photographers and writers of the current Intifada into producing certain images and not others; lecture and concert tours by prominent Israelis; training commentators to make frequent references to the Holocaust and Israel's predicament today; many advertisements in the newspapers attacking Arabs and praising Israel.

Indeed, it doesn't take much to find a whole spread of these kinds of resources available on the internet. It also seems that Israeli papers have a tendency to feature op-eds critical of the portrayal of Israel and Israeli citizens in the New York Times. This one even goes so far as to say of the Times' article; "Does every American – in fact, every person in any democracy not follow and vote with their “personal, ideological and financial agenda?” Is the Times saying Adelson is not allowed to do that simply because he is a self-made billionaire? Isn’t that what every poor man seeks to become? A rich self-made man? Is that not the essence of greatness in America – putting one’s money where his mouth is?" Whoa.

      The above from Said's article also makes me consider the propagandist implications of the free Birthright trip to Israel that many of my Jewish friends have jumped on-- an opportunity that I might now blush to have so deeply envied. In fact, it turns out that Birthright trips have been criticized fairly widely for their propagandist nature and have even been implicated in protests of the Occupy movement. The Jewish newspaper Haaretz explains: 

      In a mission statement titled "Occupy the Occupiers: A Jewish Call to Action," the Young, Jewish, and Proud (YJP), described as the youth wing of the left-leaning Jewish Voice for Peace movement, called out to young Jews to "stand up to the 1% in our own community, the powerful institutions that support Israel’s corporate-backed military control of the Palestinian people and act as the gatekeepers for our community."

         And the work of the Jewish Voice for Peace movement is hardly the only Jewish organization in America advocating solidarity among Jews and Palestinians. Said also mentioned the efforts of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee to stop hate crimes against Arabs in the US following September 11th------ as well as well as their efforts to broaden perspectives on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the American education system. 

        I was led to Said's article when thinking about Israeli propaganda in the states because I recently read his excellent introduction to Joe Sacco's comic series Palestine. Sacco's method jives with Said's because both argue in favor of using media to expose scenarios that journalists would not be tasked or paid to write about. To this point the two advocate for an equalized exposure of Palestinian and Israeli perspectives, but also for a bottom-up approach which exposes the experiences of individuals suffering through the violence, and the refugee camps, and the lack of state control rather than recent  diplomatic events. 
        It is refreshing to see such an intellectual such as Said transverse the institution to write direct political commentary. In both aspects of his work he focuses on how governments censor news coverage and how stories are reported. And his writing provides education that disrupts the media and makes us climb back into the more sensible place of skepticism.

Laying Remains to Rest at the Sept. 11th Memorial

  The New York Times ran a good article this month on the dialogue surrounding 9/11 Museum's handling of the unidentified remains from the site of 9/11. What most interests me about this story is the close relationship of the public to the curation and design of the Museum's exhibitions and the type of place that this relationship creates. 

                                                                                          An excerpt from the Times: 

This work will be hard but imperative. Ideally, a consensus among the families can be reached. In its absence, the 9/11 museum could either devise a means to determine the majority of families’ viewpoint (majority rules) or offer a new solution that strives to address the widest array of concerns (multiplicity rules). But more than offering a quick fix, the mere process of dialogue will demonstrate respect and an acknowledgment that curators do not have exclusive power over the dead. The families should be given the chance to give consent — to exercise their rights as kin.

                           Of course it is imperative that the human remains find their proper resting place. But the collaborative curation in this case makes me also wonder about the handling of other types of war artifacts and the community's say in what museums do with their endowments. It seems that the closer the themes of art and public projects hit to home the more they must be shrouded in tenderness and collaborative communication. Moreover, the closer they are to home, the more those immediately affected by the historical events remembered are part of the creative process and the more claim they have to the monument.
                           I think this is perhaps what draws me most to museums created to recognize specific historical circumstances and tragedies even though many would rather look to conceptual and the avant-garde art. In monuments and memorials, it is known that the curation and design corresponds to an expressed human interest and to the memory of those influenced by the event rather than by a monarchical curatorial team thinking on the international scale or trying to outdo the latest trend. It is a necessary part of museums such as the 9/11 Memorial to be extremely intimate, but it is also something I think museums across the board could take a card from.

Sketching the State of American Vets

                     The body of a veteran represents the walking manifestation of war. In the German Weimar Republic, it was the breadth of WWI veterans with prosthetic limbs that inspired many artists of the likes of Otto Dix and others of the New Objectivity movement in the 1920s and 30s to depict the effects of technological change in warfare and society after the war. 
                    The Joe Bonham Project sponsors artists to depict the physicality of war through sketches and representations of the wounded in military hospital across the states. The project realizes the potential of representation to implant a kind of emotionality that photography struggles with because of it's implicit claim to truth. What is especially appealing is that these sketches represent communions between artists and veterans that took time, trust, and intimacy to create. These however, are not interviews and the exchange was not so much verbal as corporeal and I daresay even spiritual. Moreover though these drawing might fall into the portrait category they aim to depict more than the person of focus but a collected series of young individuals who are burdened with the corporeal weight of our political decisions. 
                Look for a comic book, a traveling exhibition, and future releases of images in the future. I'll be sure to post them online as I find. 

War Memories in Six Words

"He Still Wants to Go Back." 

                  "Gonna Rip That Uniform off Him."

   The talent of quickly summing up one's present attitude is the stuff of serious attention in our daily lives from twitter post to text to #hashtag. Ok. But what happens when this form of writing becomes the stuff of art and history-making? Can it be informative or does it produce more of the same head-scratching vaguery that hashtag inside-jokes written by out-of-touch friends across the country might produce?

                     Upstart Smith Magazine's Six Word Memoirs showcases this talent, boasting categories like 'Moms' along with more serious subjects such as 'Divorce' and gasp... even 'War' and featuring the good ones like it's a competition. The site apparently even deals with some official veterans organizations to push it's specific brand of wartime memory making.

(From the URL): "Smith Magazine is honored to team up with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) to hear stories about coming home from war- in exactly six words...

                     It is clear from the site that the majority of folks posting to this category are the loved ones of people serving overseas who are looking for solidarity. When someone writes, "Best words. 'Mom I'll be home," they are asking for sympathy from the nebulous number of people who might stumble across the post somewhere on the site. In this case your tag line is not just for subscribed 'friends' to read but for an unknown audience. This is 'fishing' for compliments in the vast pool of well, anyone. 

                    But there is something eerie about simplifying the complexity of the human psyche down to a tag line when we're talking about war. When writing in this style, we shoot for profundity, for revelation, for that which needs no elaboration. Or at least, we can pretend to do those things without doing them at all. It's like a game of darts where you try to nail down your emotions, but run out of darts real fast. 

                     This is probably the problem tackled by my friends who've abandoned their facebooks and is the reason why I cringe when I browse Six Word Memoirs. I don't know any Iraq/ Afghanistan vets personally, but it's hard to say I get anything from reading, "your letters are keeping me sane," or "Should I re-enlist? Told him yes." 

                                                         So why even go there?

                      I'm starting to think that when discourses on war get tossed into the internet melting pot, the projects that interest us fit into the molds already carved out by our preferences for different media platforms. As it goes, you will probably not log on to Six Word Memoirs unless you dig writing hashtags. And you will probably not try to understand the emotional effect the war is having on you in six words unless you really dig hashtags, or maybe want to shape up your hashtag writing or interpreting capabilities. 

Reporting Veterans: "Beyond the Battlefield"

  
      In April, 2012, the Huffington Post senior military correspondent David Wood won the journal a Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for his 10-part series on wounded veterans called "Beyond the Battlefield: Rebuilding Wounded Warriors" assembled from several months of reporting and interviews. The seven year-old web-based news journal is the first of it's kind to win the Pulitzer and there is talk that the award signifies that web-based reporting is gaining relevance and respect.

      "Beyond the Battlefield" boasts a quantity of photographs in sizes that rival the bucksome spreads of online tabloids. Though this adds immediate intrigue and click-ability, this is a site which could use a table of contents and a reduction of 'sponsored links' which make it easy to confuse Wood's stories for others advertised by the Post. But lo' a yonder internal order doth emerge in everything, and once "Beyond the Battlefield's does, it holds mature.

                     The series explores how veterans and their families heal from the mental and psychical strains of war. Wood reminds readers of his heady purpose unceasingly, linking the intensity of each article to the weight our society must carry collectively. He writes in an article on veteran caregivers:

                     No one, a decade ago, anticipated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would produce more than 50,000 battle casualties, among them some 16,000 young Americans so badly injured -- "ripped out of the hands of death" by advanced trauma care, as a Navy surgeon put it -- that many of them would require lifetime care.

Wood gravitates towards explicit, uncensored details of combat scenarios down to the macabre paths of stray shrapnel and the gruesome symptoms of chronic medical illness. He reveals something that glamorous movies trying to be unglamorous, like the highly praised Hurt Locker (2008) which valorizes the intensity and skill needed to participate in war, cannot do. That is, to bring the focus away from combat and make war into something that extends far beyond the front lines where most war reporters are sent.

                   This approach embraces the enduring interest of most people on the affect of war on public psychology and the institutions and programs that cope with our losses after the fact. In this way, Wood recognizes something that intellectuals have been getting at since WWI- that war is a totalizing force that we all take part in on the home-front and bear the weight of in our own homes even if we choose only to follow the news on the battlefront.

Christian Boltanski: Exhibitions Remembering the Holocaust

      Though I prefer this blog to address projects related to more contemporary wars for the sake of consistency and succinctness, I think this story deserves a place. The power of massive amounts of organized information to overwhelm the emotions is perhaps the most foundational principle of the work of French sculptor Christian Boltanski, who has exhibited over 150 works internationally. Boltanski draws on this principle to allow viewers to respond to the physicality of the Holocaust by viewing enormous collections of photographs and materials meant to evoke the sheer number of lives taken. 

       A recent car conversation I had about choice superpowers somehow seems to apply to his method. When a friend said they wanted 'omniscience' we scratched the brainstorming powers stage and started talking about whether it would be good, or even possible to know everything. 

       One friend made the point that meaning is made from narrative---- and so omniscience would be impossible without something like a google search bar. Something to collect and organize. This was the side I ended up standing by, and also the position that makes me skeptical of the impact and ethicality of works like his exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, where a room full of clothes collected in neat squares is constantly clawed at by an industrial crane like a certain arcade game we are all familiar with. 

       Instead of trying to give faces to the faceless and discover the personal within the mass, he collages the personal to create the mass montage. The room of notes and letters of victims becomes a monochromatic heap of representation rather than an organized historical system. But I think that I can stand by his work by believing that he is commenting on the curatorial limitations of archiving and organizing the artifacts of war. In effect, the artifacts belong to collective emotions beyond their own messages and must be grouped creatively rather than indexically or logically. 

       It's not a stance an archivist would take, and certainly not a textbook strategy, but for the purposes of delving into the dark recesses of human emotion, and for the purposes of evoking utter chaos and voicelessness, Boltanski may just achieve his aim.