Shooting and Remembering: Some thoughts on Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir opens with wild dogs peltering down Rothschild Boulevard, on an unseasonably windy Tel Aviv night. It’s instantly unsettling, this dream sequence, and I was more agitated than usual by the latecomers whispering in the aisle. Then we cut to our hero, Ari Folman himself, sipping a twilight pint with his friend in a cosy pub, transported to the port to emphasise the effect of the stormy sea cascading outside. Soon, we learn, Folman wants to try and remember what he did during the First Lebanon War, how he’s connected.

Shooting and Crying is the phrase given to the Israeli tendency to take part in brutal acts of violence, to wailingly bemoan the fact afterwards, and then to carry on shooting. It’s a derogatory description of the Israeli preference for psychoanalytic reflection over political action, embodied by Golda Meit’s famous complaint to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

Waltz with Bashir has rightly received praise from a diverse range of sources, and came close to winning the Palmes D’Or at Cannes this year. It’s an extraordinary film, one of the best war movies ever made, blurring the line between documentary and fictional narrative, while at the same time showing just how potent a medium animation can be. It’s also – and perhaps this is what’s really unsettling – deeply beautiful. The pursuit of a teenage rocket-launcher in an orchard appears like an image drawn from a Greek epic; a soldier spraying bullets like a maniac on a Beirut street looks like the loveliest thing in the world. I suppose this is what one friend was getting at when he said he didn’t like the fact that it was a cartoon. I understand his concerns – the cartoon is firmly established in our consciousness as a diversion for children – but by the end it’s clear that only animation could have helped Folman with his remembering.

Folman is trying to remember what happened: by talking to his comrades, and with the aid of psychologists, he is able to get closer to the truth of his experiences. He has stated explicitly that Waltz with Bashir is not intended as a political film, and – given the central place of Sabra & Shatila in the Arab-Israeli propaganda war – this is a brave statement indeed. So while the atrocitities of Israel and its Phalangist allies dominate the film, it would be a mistake to see Waltz with Bashir as some kind of national mea culpa. Folman is happy to leave that task to the op-ed writers and agitators. Instead, he has unapologetically made a film for the perpetrators and the bystanders, a kind of banality of evil for the twenty-first century.

Pyschological experiments have shown that people find it harder to recall details of violent events than quotidian ones. At the start of the film, aside from the waiting on the beach and the furloughs home, Folman remembers nothing of his soldier days in Lebanon. Painstakingly, he manages to unravel the truth, all the way to the camps of Sabra & Shatila, where the most notorious (although by no means the only) massacre of the war took place. The audience knows what is coming from the beginning; this doesn’t make the finale any less startling or wrenching. At the very end, Folman makes a brief switch to the live footage that previously served as inspiration for the animated sketches. His explanation for this is that he didn’t want audiences going away without having a real-life sense of what the camps looked like after the slaughter. A responsible finale, or the justifications of a filmmaker who doesn’t quite have the courage of his convictions, who isn’t quite able to see his vision through to the very end? It’s hard to say.

Sitting in the cinema in silence, I felt I had a small sense of what it must have been like to be a German watching Schindler’s List in Berlin. The Lebanon War was an unmitigated disaster, the Israeli overreaction par excellence, resulting in 20,000 civilian casualties and the steady erosion of Israeli deterrence over the following years. Folman has shown our folly in a remarkable new light, and at the same time has breathed new life into the war movie genre. Following Beaufort, Israel can once again take dubious pride in being able to make the best war movies around. The depressing implications of this don’t need to be spelled out. Just go and see Waltz with Bashir, traipse silently home afterwards, and – if you can – try and remember.