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.
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.
"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.
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| The Graphic Novel Cover |
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| Massacre of Palestinians in Shatila, 1982 |
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