a breeze of art

By   Bibi Ayesha Wadvalla
Freelance Writer - South Africa
The human mind is capable of suppressing painful memories to the extent that they are all obliterated. But these memories can lie dormant for years then reactivate to plague the plethora of our consciousness.
Such is the story of Ari Folman, an Israeli film director, who has created an autobiographical animated rendition of his time in the Israeli army, Waltz with Bashir. This is not

classical animation, but rather a depiction of the murkiness of adult clarity. It is a documentary which unsettles and disturbs the viewer, a recording of truth made more vivid by animation.
Out of the nine people interviewed by Folman, seven voices are those of the interviewees. The other two chose to have their words spoken by actors. This gives depth to a deep film whose impact could otherwise be lessened.

Dreams Against Reality

The opening scene is hallucinatory in its stimulation of the senses-charcoal buildings, yellow sky, a pack of dogs gleaming black, with glowing yellow eyes, savage in their strength of congregation, running, snarling, charting a path of fear for those they pass by, chasing after one man.

This scene is the dream of Folman's friend, a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon war, a recurring dream which signifies his guilt at shooting 26 dogs in Lebanon. Dogs which stood guard at the camps the Israeli army entered.

For Folman, the Lebanon war is a miasma of emptiness in his memory. But after hearing of his friend's dream, a hazy image fogs his mind, and for the first time in twenty years, he remembers Lebanon. Not just Lebanon, Beirut, but Sabra and Shatila. The massacre.

Waltz with Bashir mastered the juxtaposition of dreams with reality. Folman is uncertain of the truth of what he sees, and so he contacts long-lost friends whose faces he often envisages. Boys who have just become men, boys bathing in the sea by moonlight; men who are soldiers trained to kill.

He speaks to those who had served with him, the first journalist to cover the massacre, a psychologist. His old friends do not remember the way he describes them by imagination, marking it as his own interpretation. They were all there, but they all remember it differently. Human memory invents things which are not real, filling in details where there are gaps.
The Warsaw Ghettoes?
The jarring snapshots of insidious imaginings of Folman and the puerile pornography create a chasm of emotion. Soldiers exist numbingly, sheltered in tanks that make them feel invincible, unloading dead bodies mechanically, watching, obeying, without thinking.

Yet fear consumes them, inducing insane episodes-a unit of soldiers seeing a boy in an orchard with a weapon, firing, firing, seeing the boy convulse a slow dance of death; Israeli soldiers in Beirut coming under fire from snipers, one dancing a waltz with his machine-gun; a waltz with posters of Bashir Gemayel, the Christian Phalangist leader.

It is when Bashir was assassinated that the Christian Phalangist Army, with the full support of the Israeli army, went into the camps and rounded up the women, children and the elderly. Loaded into trucks, led to stadiums, the comparison can only be to the Warsaw ghettoes.

The soldiers suspect, but they do and say nothing. Some do, and are assured the army is handling it. When Ariel Sharon is told of it, he merely says, ‘Thank you for bringing it to my attention.’ History now records that Sharon himself was the mastermind behind the plan, a conductor in the orchestra of destruction.

If Waltz of War is an ‘acid trip’, as Folman calls it, then the flashbacks will perpetuate in continuity. For aren't we all soldiers of war? We witness live scenes; we are stuck to our television screens. Yet, we do nothing.

We too will have our flashbacks, but only when history records this injustice. For now, we accept the morsels of discarded remnants of truth we are fed, and thus are satiated by lies.

While Folman is antiwar, the message the film portrays is ambiguous. While the account of boys sent to fight a war of which they barely know anything about is haunting, they cannot be called innocent. Yes, for some, innocence was sacrificed in slaughter, but this cannot absolve them of guilt. Acknowledgement of a lie is not a victory for truth.

Thus I was left unsure if Waltz with Bashir is an honest admission of regret, or a partly propaganda piece for pity.

But with the war on Gaza still fresh in the world’s goldfish memories of atrocities, Waltz with Bashir is very likely to walk away with an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

Bibi Ayesha Wadvalla is a South African freelance writer and radio presenter. You can contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

From: Islameonline.net