During the current moment being enjoyed by the animated
documentary genre (Chicago 10, Persepolis), Waltz with
Bashir will stand as a landmark triumph. Already the recipient of
numerous awards, including six Israeli Academy Awards, and a likely
winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the glowing buzz that
precedes director Ari Folman’s dark, hallucinatory memoir of a tour of
duty during the Lebanese Civil War is justifiable.
The film is built around Folman’s search for memories of his
experience, at the age of 19, in the Israeli Army during the occupation
of Beirut. It is there that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were
massacred in an event that is the primary reference point in Folman’s
fleeting, troublesomely absent recollections. But most of Bashir is an episodic, chronologically jumbled collage, narrated by the fellow
veterans he seeks out to interview about what they remember. The film’s
less historically fastidious than it is evocative of the tragic
sameness of soldiers’ daily lives in active combat; Folman’s fellow
soldiers’ memories create a grotesque composite of etched trauma that
includes child combatants, slaughtered innocents, and the restlessness
of constant proximity to a deadly enemy.
The animation, jagged and brooding against a soundtrack of early
’80s angst (in a good way) is a surprisingly effective mode of
portrayal for the unwavering darkness of the material. A harsh, abrupt
deviation from this style in the film’s last minutes may be
artistically controversial—but not to an extent worth disputing
the profundity of the filmmaking that precedes it.
Heretofore a documentary filmmaker of more traditional means,
Folman’s use of painterly strokes to visualize the hindsight of
Waltz‘s interviewees, including himself, is a strangely natural
choice—not least for its ability to highlight the questionability
in documentary works’ representational veracity. Stylistically and
thematically, Waltz with Bashir could scarcely be more relevant,
and if you are new to—or dubious of—the marriage between
animation and reality, this is where you’ll find its ablest
example.