TEL AVIV
EARLY in the film “Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman, the filmmaker and main character, looks at a photograph of himself as an Israeli soldier in the 1982 Lebanon war and cannot recognize his younger incarnation. The boy in the uniform may as well be a stranger.
Last month, sitting in his studio in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, discussing the movie — an animated documentary that has drawn praise in Israel and Europe and opens Dec. 26 in New York — Mr. Folman, 45, said things had changed. “Now I see the picture and I say, ‘Yes that’s me.’ ”
His journey of self-recognition, from suppression to acceptance of his role in a despised war and traumatic massacre, may or may not echo a similar process in Israeli society at large. But it has struck a chord. Israelis are seeing the film in large numbers and praising its frank portrayal of life in uniform in a country that has tended to dismiss the psychic damage that can result from being a soldier in war.
“This film documents — really documents — the feelings and sensations and emotional experiences of a simple soldier in a war which is very similar to those being conducted now in Gaza and in the West Bank,” said Ron Ben-Yishai, an Israeli journalist famous for his reporting of the 1982 war and a character in the film.
It is noteworthy that Mr. Ben-Yishai, one of Israel’s most honored correspondents, uses the word “documents” so consciously, since the film appears on the surface to be the opposite of a document. Told through painterly drawings in muted tones, it is an examination of repressed memories as much as it is of the Sabra and Shatila massacre that forms the agonizing core of its plot.
But Mr. Ben-Yishai is right. The film is both the psychologically compelling story of Mr. Folman’s search for his own past — his younger self — based on videotaped interviews he conducted and a scrupulous recounting of the massacre of hundreds (some say thousands) of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian Forces inadvertently facilitated by the Israeli Army. The characters’ contemporary words and voices emerge from their computer-generated images, while the 1982 scenes in Lebanon are based on their accounts and Mr. Folman’s recollection and research.
The result is surprisingly gripping, a tribute to Mr. Folman’s emotional honesty, his effort to explore rather than accuse. Winning awards in Israel and abroad, the film is being submitted by Israel to the Oscars in the categories of best foreign-language film and animation.
At the start of “Waltz With Bashir,” Mr. Folman has a drink with Boaz, an old friend who tells him about a repeating nightmare in which wild dogs torment him. The dogs are a result of his war experience in Lebanon in 1982, when his job was to help preserve the surprise of invading Israeli troops by shooting barking dogs in advance.
Didn’t Mr. Folman face flashbacks or other disturbances from that war? Boaz asks.
No, Mr. Folman responds, he never thinks about the war. Ever.
But something has been triggered.
That night he has a vision in which he and two fellow soldiers emerge naked from the Mediterranean onto a Beirut beach filled with corpses. After they dress and reach the street, hundreds of wailing and mourning women, survivors of the massacre, come their way.
After that scene repeats itself in his mind in the coming weeks and months, Mr. Folman sets out to discover its meaning. Did it in fact occur?
Unlike many Israelis, Mr. Folman, a television and film director and writer (he was one of the original writers on the Israeli series “In Treatment,” adapted by HBO), did not maintain links to his fellow soldiers in the Golani Brigade in Lebanon. Instead, he said in the interview, he consciously cut off all those ties.
He sets out to find as many of them as possible and ask whether they recall the scene at the beach, what else they remember and how the war has affected them. He also seeks out the expertise of psychologists on memory and trauma.
Mr. Folman said that the need to re-enact the scenes in Lebanon was the biggest reason he turned to animation — it would have been impossibly expensive otherwise — but not the only one.
“Animation functions on the border between reality and the subconscious,” he said. “In exploring memory and fantasy, animation made sense to me. I used a combination of cut-out animation and computer drawing.”
The war stories his former colleagues tell him in the film are harrowing — a Mercedes some of them shot up believing it to contain the enemy, only to discover they had slaughtered a family; ambushes that killed friends — and the re-enactments shown over their voices draw us in deeply as we join Mr. Folman on his quest. Many of those interviewed have clearly suffered various degrees of trauma. Mr. Folman’s own memory is jogged, and he recalls one of his most difficult assignments: to put dead and wounded Israeli soldiers in a tank and dump them near a helicopter for transport to Israel. Blood is swabbed from the tank floor like dirty water after a mopping.
Some Arab critics have complained that Mr. Folman emphasizes the impact on Israelis rather than on those who truly suffered: the Palestinian refugees and the Lebanese. But Mr. Folman said he wanted to explore the issue from a personal and Israeli perspective. To do otherwise would be patronizing. “I feel very strongly that it is not my mission or job to deal with the other side,” he said.
The massacre was a scene of unspeakable terror in which the Lebanese forces, also known as the Phalange, entered the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and killed randomly for some 72 hours to exact revenge for the assassination of their leader, Lebanon’s president-elect, Bashir Gemayel (the Bashir of the film’s title). Israeli troops in control of the area and allied with the Phalange shot flares to light the way for the Lebanese and never intervened. They said they had no idea the killing was taking place, although many have argued that they should have suspected as much. Mr. Folman was among the soldiers on duty near the camps.
Sabra and Shatila is sometimes referred to as an Israeli massacre, which it was not, and it may be that the film’s clarity on this point has helped make it palatable in Israel and to its officials. But the movie, with occasional Holocaust references, is not seeking to let Israelis off the hook.
As Mr. Ben-Yishai, the journalist, put it, “Ari is saying: ‘I am asking questions I inhibited for such a long time. I know we didn’t kill them, but are we really better than the Europeans who stood by when the Holocaust took place?’ ”
Mention of the Holocaust may jar, since nothing in the story compares with the Nazis’ systematic multiyear slaughter of millions of Jews in some two dozen countries. But as Mr. Folman said in the interview: “In Israel the Holocaust is in our DNA. We see mass murder, and what on earth could it remind us of but our past?”
Both of Mr. Folman’s parents — his mother is a doctor, and his father, now dead, was a chemist — were survivors of Auschwitz, and the Holocaust was a constant presence as he was growing up. As he discovers during the film from a psychologist friend, his repression of Sabra and Shatila may have been related to repression of a kind of phantom memory of the Holocaust.
Perhaps most of all, “Waltz With Bashir” succeeds as an exploration of individual emotion in a national trauma. Since the vast majority of young Israelis serve in the army and many face disturbing episodes or encounters, the film has opened a rare conversation here about the impact of those experiences.
“Israel has a long history of being ambivalent about trauma,” said Danny Brom, one of the country’s leading trauma psychologists. “Our kids serve in the army for three years and go to combat units being hyper-alert and looking for enemies, and then they are supposed to just forget about it. On the last day of army service they don’t ease you out. They teach you how to write your C.V. I see the reaction to this movie as part of an effort to take this whole question much more seriously.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/movies/14bron.html?pagewanted=print
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
