Waltz with Bashir
Our first case study is Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, an animated feature-length documentary inspired by the director’s recovery of long- repressed memories of his time serving with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the Israel-Lebanon War of 1982.
Within territory under IDF occupation, Lebanese Christian Phalangists massacred thousands of civilians in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps as retribution for the assassination of president-elect Bashir Gemayel. The documentary explores how memory functions and fails when tainted by trauma. Juxtaposing past and present, memories and dreams, the film relies heavily on animation. Only in the finale, when the animation yields to harrowing footage of the massacre’s aftermath, do “real” images confront the viewer. Rather than taking the truthfulness and literality of the documentary genre for granted, Waltz with Bashir self-consciously centers on a painstaking effort to make sense of the protagonist’s troubled emotions and dissociated memories.That the past cannot be rendered literally and directly is already underscored by the documentary’s narrative and temporal structure. Major historical events, from Israel’s invasion of Lebanon to Bashir’s assassination and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, are evoked chronologically. Yet the past breaks into the contemporary perspective from which the story is told in several instances, which are marked by sudden changes in the musical score, rapid cuts, and fade-overs. The viewer begins to realize that linear chronological narration is not a simple or neutral undertaking but is rather an (only partially successful) attempt to bind and master distressing events, to work through and counter the uncontrolled anachronisms of acting out. The chronological storytelling is thus part of Folman’s effort to reconstruct his role in the war, an endeavor both spurred and hindered in particular by one erratic, intrusive, and recurring flashback: that of Folman and two companions wading through the sea against the backdrop of a yellow sky.
As they emerge from the water to enter the city, assumed to be Beirut, they are confronted by a group of wailing, ghostlike women.Even more than the frequent distortions of linear time, the film’s use of animation is central to its conceptualization of trauma. Annabelle Honess Roe (2013) reminds us that documentary filmmakers have often substituted animated sequences for absent real-world footage. In contrast to such “mimetic animation,” Roe argues, Waltz with Bashir employs animation in a more structural and “evocative” way (p. 26), using it to conjure up emotional memories and embodied experiences. To be sure, the film’s scenes of animated talking heads align with Roe’s notion of mimesis. But its most effective mobilization of animation is in the flashbacks, nightmares, and highly stylized reenactments based on the characters’ distorted memories and testimonies of the war. Animation’s evocative possibilities reach their full potential when Ca’an, Folman’s friend and a former IDF soldier, recalls how, feeling seasick on a boat during the invasion of Lebanon, he began to hallucinate. While he imagined how a giant, floating naked woman carried him away across the waves, the actual boat with his fellow soldiers was bombed. An animated scene reenacts Ca’an’s memory, showing the naked giantess, which makes it clear not only that Ca’an’s account is inaccurate but also that no other memory is available to him or, consequently, to the viewer. In this scene, as in many others, animation signals that the subjects’ access to history is filtered through the distorted feelings and fantasies of the traumatized mind.
The animated scenes in Waltz with Bashir constitute a particular form of reenactment, and they are beset with the tensions accompanying its use in documentary film. As Stella Bruzzi (2006, 2020) points out, reenactment has an intimate, albeit troubled, relationship with the documentary genre, one that has long been tainted by derogatory views of reenactment as a second-rate substitute for the realities the camera failed to capture.
Bruzzi scrutinizes the ideal, implied in such views, of unmediated access to reality and of an indexical link between the documentary image and its referent.2 Instead, building on John Austin’s analysis of constative and performative utterances, Bruzzi reconceptualizes documentary as a form that always already derives its meaning from the discrepancy between “performance and reality” (2006, p. 186). At the heart of documentary film, she argues, is a tension between past actions and their performative repetition and representation in the present (2020, pp. 49-50).3 The overt use of reenactment highlights this tension and may serve to explore the relations between the (unfinished business of) the past and the “active presentness” (Bruzzi, 2020, p. 50) of its contemporary restaging. Thus, in the words of Bruzzi, reenactment in documentary film frequently “offers a re-opening, a re-visiting or a re-interrogation of an event,” serving as a reminder that “the past and the present are not distinct domains” (2020, pp. 50-51). This is precisely the message that Waltz with Bashir conveys through its exuberant employment of animation-style reenactment. Adopting the close-up perspectives of traumatized IDF soldiers, the film uses animated reenactment to show how, for these veterans, the past leaks into the present in ways that are by no means transparent. The recalled and recounted events of the 1980s, as the animated form of these reenactments underscores, cannot be reproduced literally, as they are shaped and distorted by the affect of trauma.This is true for most of the film, but the tenor shifts in the finale, when the return of Folman’s memory is portrayed through archival images. The scenes leading up to the cut (still animated) are based on the reportage of the Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai. The camera moves through an alley and through a crowd of wailing women (the sounds coming from archival footage that is not yet shown) to slowly settle, close-up, on Folman’s confused face, with his eyes ending up in the very middle of the frame
Figure 16.1 The close-up of Folman’s face as shown in Waltz with Bashir.
(Figure 16.1).
Unexpectedly, the shot switches to live-action footage of the women (Figure 16.2). They speak, but their calls for help and for their sons are not subtitled for the international audience.4 After these images, the scene cuts to silent archival footage of destroyed and damaged buildings and of piles of decomposing bodies. Before the screen turns black, the camera slowly zooms in on a child’s head, scarcely visible amid piles of rubble and bodies.This is the unassimilable traumatic Real that has so long tormented Folman, a suggestion reinforced by the “archive effect” produced by the sudden switch from animated to live-action footage. According to Jaimie Baron, documentary films create such an “archive effect” when a piece of documentation is integrated from one context into another, producing an
Figure 16.2 The eyeline-match cut to live-action footage in Waltz with Bashir.
“aura of ‘authenticity’” and endowing the imagery with an “evidentiary authority” (2012, pp. 103-104). This “archive effect” in Waltz with Bashir, at least at first sight, seems to lend the final scene a truth status commonly associated with documentary film. The archival material also marks the return of the protagonist’s memory and the realization of his complicity in the harrowing atrocities: he now understands that the sky’s yellow hue in his recurring flashback was a result of the flares that he and his accomplices launched in their effort to provide the Phalangists with the light necessary for the nighttime slaughter in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Closer inspection, however, reveals that this stylistically divergent final cut, rather than privileging the irrefutable, objective “‘thereness’ of the archive” (Morag, 2012, p. 102), marks a more complex psychological reality. Crucial is the eyeline-match cut, which already translates the upcoming footage from an indexical trace into a subjective image, one generated not by Ben-Yishai’s camera but by Folman’s memory.
This reading of the scene as subjective and traumatic, rather than indexical, is supported by the sudden cut from the mediated animation to shockingly “real” images, which mimics the unbidden reliving of traumatic events that have not been cognitively assimilated, and that “return” in the patient’s mind (literally, or in distorted form) through flashbacks.5Relying on a psychiatric and cinematic tradition that conceptualizes traumatic reliving in terms of the “flashback” (cf. Luckhurst, 2008, pp. 177-208), the finale complicates the film’s take on trauma. The story’s narrative arc bends unmistakably toward Folman’s psychic mastery of his overwhelming and distressing experiences. The recovery of memory suggested in the film’s final scene, then, could be taken as a sign that repression has been lifted and that there is now a beginning from which Folman can work through the events. Yet, ultimately, the structure of the film’s ending points to the repetition compulsion, to an uncontrolled, symptomatic acting out, rather than a therapeutic working through.
The scene’s reframing of the indexical image as Folman’s subjective traumatic flashback also highlights the lopsided treatment of trauma. Notwithstanding the pervasive focus on Folman’s traumatization, he, as an indirect perpetrator, is obviously not among the main victims of the events in Lebanon in 1982. Meanwhile, the actual victims, represented by the wailing women shown at the film’s end, hardly receive a voice (Antoun, 2009). Their lamentations (in Arabic) are not subtitled, unlike the Hebrew spoken in the rest of the film, and hence remain opaque to the international and mainly non-Arab-speaking audience. While the women’s unfathomable pain results from the deliberate murder of their loved ones, Folman’s trauma is apparently wrought through the seeing of violence and through the painful recognition of his complicity.6
Nevertheless, the traumas of the IDF soldiers take center stage, their moral weight augmented through references to the Holocaust.
As Folman discusses his flashbacks with his psychiatrist friend Ori Sivan, the latterPerforming Violence 315 reassures Folman that his “interest in the massacre” is not about this particular atrocity but extends back in time. Folman’s parents had been in Auschwitz, and Sivan explains that the “massacre has been with [Folman] since [he was] six.” In their final encounter, after Folman has acknowledged his and the IDF’s complicity, Sivan absolves him from any guilt or responsibility since even though he symbolically “took on the role of a Nazi,” he did not carry out the violence himself. In this historical parallel, the slaughter in 1982 gains moral relevance only through its comparison with the Holocaust, in the face of which Sivan deems Folman’s actions to be marginal. As Raya Morag points out in her analysis of the film, “the earlier trauma [of the Holocaust] has appropriated the later one” (2012, p. 100).