[R-G] Shooting Film and Crying (Review of Waltz with Bashir)

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/lindseyINT.html

Shooting Film and Crying

Ursula Lindsey

March 2009

(Ursula Lindsey is an M.A. candidate in Near Eastern studies at New  
York University. She writes on Middle Eastern arts and culture on the  
blog www.arabist.net.)

Waltz with Bashir (2008) opens with a strange and powerful image: a  
pack of ferocious dogs running headlong through the streets of Tel  
Aviv, overturning tables and terrifying pedestrians, converging  
beneath a building’s window to growl at a man standing there. It turns  
out that this man, Boaz, is an old friend of Ari Folman, the film’s  
director and protagonist. Like Folman, he was a teenager in the  
Israeli army during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And the pack of  
menacing dogs is his recurring nightmare, a nightly vision he links to  
the many village guard dogs he shot -- so they wouldn’t raise the  
alarm -- as his platoon made its way through southern Lebanon.

The pack of growling dogs -- animal Furies -- is a striking embodiment  
of the violence of repressed memories, the fear and anger involved in  
confronting a shameful past. The rest of the film tries to answer the  
question posed by this opening nightmare -- what memories is this  
former soldier, and by extension Israeli society, pursued by? What is  
he guilty of?

In the film, Ari and Boaz, middle-aged men now, ponder this question  
over drinks, seemingly nonplussed. Ari finds that, while he can’t  
remember most of his service in Lebanon, he is also haunted by a  
vision: of himself and two friends, emerging naked from the Beirut  
sea, their skinny teenaged bodies bathed in the golden glow of night  
flares. He can’t tell if this vision is a memory or a dream. He can’t  
tell what it means. And he can’t remember where he was, or what he was  
doing, during the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the killings of  
Palestinian refugees (and other poor people living in the camps) that  
marked the tragic nadir of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and came  
to symbolize it thereafter for the Arab world. He embarks on a journey  
to interview old comrades and reconstruct the past.

Ari’s inability to remember is clearly not to be taken at face value:  
It’s a convenient framing device and a reference to the conscious or  
unconscious obfuscation of the past. It allows the film to move  
gradually toward the “discovery” of what happened in Sabra and  
Shatila, and of what role the protagonist played.

Israeli invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982. The immediate trigger was an  
attempted assassination of an Israeli ambassador in London by members  
of a Palestinian militant group. But Israel had been itching to rid  
Lebanon of the Palestinian resistance movements that had established  
bases there. Israel was already fighting the Palestine Liberation  
Organization in southern Lebanon, and was supporting the Christian  
Lebanese Forces militia in the bloody civil war that had broken out  
between them and the PLO and its supporters.

The Israeli invasion initially targeted only southern Lebanon, but  
Israeli forces pushed on northward until they reached the capital of  
Beirut. By September 1, Palestinian fighters had been evacuated from  
Beirut as part of a ceasefire agreement. On September 14, the newly  
elected president, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated, infuriating his  
supporters among the Phalange, the political party of which the  
Lebanese Forces is the military wing. On September 15, 1982, Israeli  
forces, contravening the truce agreement, occupied West Beirut and  
surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The  
Israel Defense Forces (IDF), under the command of then Minister of  
Defense Ariel Sharon, allowed Lebanese Forces militiamen -- the  
Israelis’ allies in Lebanon, and the Palestinians’ opponents in the  
civil war -- to enter the camps, supposedly to “mop up” the last  
remaining “terrorists.” While Israeli forces maintained their  
positions around the camps and on surrounding rooftops, the  
Phalangists proceeded to shoot camp residents dead -- including women  
and children. Despite reports of what was happening trickling out, for  
48 hours nothing was done to stop the massacre, which involved the  
killing of at least 1,000 people in the camps.[1] (Both the official  
IDF estimate of 700-800 and the 3,500 long cited by journalists and  
others have been discredited.) There will never be an exact accounting  
of the carnage, because in addition to the roughly 1,000 people who  
were interred in mass graves by the Red Cross or in cemeteries by  
family members, an unknown number were buried by their Phalangist  
murderers.[2] The total death toll, however, is probably considerably  
more than 2,000, for after Israeli officers on loudspeakers ordered  
the shooting stopped in Sabra and Shatila, the Phalangists herded  
surviving men, women and children out of the camps and handed them  
over to the IDF. The Israelis transported them to a sports stadium,  
where, according to numerous survivors, the women and children were  
separated from the men, most of whom “disappeared,” never to be seen  
again.[3] Phalangist militiamen were present at the stadium, and  
eyewitnesses saw many Palestinians taken away by them after being  
handed back over by the IDF. It is possible, therefore, that more  
people were killed on September 17-18, after even journalists on the  
scene thought the massacre was over, than during the sanguinary  
initial 48 hours.

The Israeli government initially denied any role whatsoever in the  
massacre, but under intense international and domestic pressure it set  
up an investigating committee, the Kahan Commission, which found that  
Israeli forces were “indirectly responsible” for the massacre and that  
Ariel Sharon was “personally responsible” and should resign. The Kahan  
Commission report contains an oblique, one-line reference to hundreds  
of camp residents having vanished, but no hint of the direct Israeli  
role reported by survivors.

Almost none of this context is present in the film, though some of the  
events are. It is barely clear why Israeli forces are in Lebanon in  
the first place. The young Israeli soldiers in the film, starting with  
the slouching, scowling hero -- Folman at 19 -- range from the  
disinterested to the confused to the naive. They’re young men with no  
ideological convictions or animosities, thrust into traumatic  
surroundings. This, of course, may not be too far from the truth:  
Nineteen-year old soldiers, generally, may well be little more than  
blithe kids with machine guns, going to war with their girlfriends on  
their minds and no sense of what lies ahead. By not giving any  
background on the war, Folman may wish to thrust his viewers into the  
conflict as unprepared as he was. But it’s hard to believe that there  
were no discussions, no opinions, in the Israeli army. And it wouldn’t  
have taken much to get across a bare-bones account of how the war  
started.

Palestinians and Lebanese, meanwhile, are almost entirely absent from  
the film. There are distant, silent, undifferentiated images of them.  
They’re fighters, snipers, dead bodies, targets as seen from Israeli  
planes. They’re a child in the shadows of an orchard, holding a rocket  
grenade launcher. Again, this may be true to the experience of war, to  
the way in which the enemy remains physically and psychologically at a  
great remove. Folman has said that it wasn’t his place to depict the  
Palestinian point of view, telling an interviewer: “Who am I to tell  
their stories? They have to tell their own stories.”[4] This attitude  
seems a little glib, considering that film production isn’t exactly  
booming in the Occupied Territories.

One-sidedness and self-absorption may be inevitable in any nation’s  
reckoning with its military history. And the glamorization of the  
fighting may be inevitable too -- Francois Truffaut once famously  
remarked that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film because any  
film about a war can’t help visually celebrating it. In scenes that  
are very reminiscent of American films about the Vietnam war, montages  
of casual violence are set to thumping rock and roll music. The film’s  
general “anti-war” message is partly undercut by this thrilling  
presentation of military might and youthful recklessness.

Yet the fact remains that these scenes are visually and aurally  
thrilling, and the soundtrack is just one strong point of Waltz with  
Bashir. It’s a clever, original, mesmerizing film. It imaginatively  
melds a variety of genres: autobiography, documentary, animation.  
Folman uses the rotoscope technique pioneered by Richard Linklater in  
his films A Waking Life and Through a Scanner Darkly -- in which  
scenes are first filmed with real actors and then overlaid with  
drawings, preserving the realistic features and movements of the  
actors. The animation allows the story to move between different times  
and different realities; between the characters’ inner and outer  
lives; between vision, dreams, flights of fancy and reconstructions of  
the war. There are many evocative and extremely memorable images,  
which will stay with viewers’ long afterwards.

But reviewers around the world have come together in applauding Waltz  
with Bashir not just for its aesthetic value but also for its supposed  
moral courage. Jason Harsin writes in Bright Lights Film Journal,  
“Paradoxically, as horrific as those events were and are, there's  
something magnanimous about Folman’s determination to investigate them  
-- and his role in them -- from a dream ‘suggestion’ and a friend’s  
question.”[5] In the New York Times, A. O. Scott writes, “Waltz with  
Bashir is a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of  
investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film.” He calls it  
a work of “astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral  
power.”[6] A reviewer in Israel’s highbrow liberal daily, Ha’aretz,  
goes further: “If I had to choose one Israeli film that represents  
Israeli cinema…this is the film I would choose.”[7]

Waltz with Bashir is best appreciated as a rumination on the personal  
experience of war, on the way images and memories are erased or  
created in the mind. As such, it arguably shouldn’t be burdened with  
too much political deconstruction -- it’s art, and art is under no  
obligation to take clear-cut positions. Yet the film also aspires to  
be a documentary work, an intervention in the historical account of  
the 1982 Lebanon war. It has reaped the benefits -- critical and  
commercial -- of being a morally and intellectually “serious” work,  
one that takes a war and a civilian massacre as its subject.

The film won a slew of Israeli film awards and a Golden Globe for Best  
Foreign Film; it was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars.  
Most recently, Folman took home the top film industry honor in France,  
the Cesar, again for Best Foreign Film. And although the film is  
banned in Lebanon (which has never signed a peace agreement with  
Israel), a small screening in Beirut by Umam (the Lebanese Association  
for Cultural and Artistic Exchange) was widely covered in the press.  
“The subject of this film is a crucial moment in the history of  
Lebanon, for the history of Israel, for the history of the  
Palestinians and for the history of Palestinian life in Lebanon,” Umam  
founder Monika Borgmann told Ha’aretz.[8]

The film deplores war and wishes to register its horror at the Sabra  
and Shatila massacres. The final scene, in which we are suddenly  
confronted with documentary footage of piles of dead bodies and of  
survivors screaming and cursing in front of TV cameras, is wrenching.  
Yet we almost all deplore war, and wars and other atrocities happen  
nonetheless.

The fundamental question in Waltz with Bashir is that of collective  
and individual responsibility. And to this question the film never  
gives a satisfying answer. Ariel Sharon’s role is touched upon, but  
the film ultimately indicts the IDF less forcefully than the Kahan  
Commission did 25 years ago. One character may compare the  
Palestinians emerging from Sabra and Shatila to Jews coming out of the  
Warsaw Ghetto, and state: “We were the Nazis.” That is not the film’s  
final message. Ari sums the situation up by saying (in the face of  
troubling evidence): “The penny never dropped. We never realized they  
were carrying out a genocide.” (Folman has also maintained in  
interviews that he and his fellow soldiers “had no clue what was going  
on: We didn’t know there was a massacre.”[9]) “They” are the  
Phalangists, whose brutality is depicted, justly, as horrifying, but  
also as a counterpoint to the ethically anguished position of the  
Israeli onlookers. Yet as the title of the film should clearly  
suggest, the Israelis were the Phalangists’ willing partners in this  
deadly pas de deux. Arguably, they led the dance.

In Waltz with Bashir, the challenge posed by the fierce opening scene  
is left unanswered. The unvoiced accusation of the growling dogs is  
paralleled, at the end, by the collective scream of Palestinian women  
who emerge from the camps. But as Naira Antoun has pointed out in one  
of the few critical reviews of the film, published by the Electronic  
Intifada website,[10] the non-Israeli victims are never given a voice:  
They snarl and they wail, but they do not speak. Israelis are the only  
subjects: They interrogate themselves, confront themselves and  
ultimately congratulate themselves for their moral courage in doing  
so. Folman is the child of Holocaust survivors and his psychiatrist  
friend tells him that his concern with Sabra and Shatila is really  
about “those other camps.” Marked by the victimization of his parents,  
he must confront the possibility that he has been a victimizer in his  
turn. But this is an entirely inward, therapeutic journey -- what he  
never confronts are the victims themselves. The film is, in Antoun’s  
worlds, “a story of Israeli self-discovery and redemption,” and “an  
act not of limited self-reflection but self-justification.” Or, as Tom  
Segev puts it, less gently, in Ha’aretz, “The film Waltz with Bashir  
belongs to the kvetch genre: ‘Oy, how traumatic that massacre in Sabra  
and Chatila was for us.’”[11]

When asked in an interview whether his film belongs to the “shooting  
and crying” genre, Folman insisted, “When you watch this film, you  
have no doubt who the victims are.” It’s “impossible,” he continued,  
to sympathize with the Israeli soldiers. I beg to differ, as I think  
would most viewers of the film -- one is most definitely led to  
sympathize with the soldiers, young men who when stranded think of  
their mothers, who are appalled by wounded horses, who are never shown  
engaging in any sort of up-close brutality.

There is a final irony. Waltz with Bashir holds a redemptive message,  
celebrating the necessity and the ability to confront one’s past. Yet  
the film and its reception exemplify the strictly enforced boundaries  
of any debate on Israel’s past and present transgressions.

That many are made nervous by the idea of even discussing this chapter  
in Israel’s military past is made evident by the website of the  
Foundation for Jewish Culture, which partly funded the film. The  
Foundation has made available a detailed “Viewer’s Guide,” with  
frequently asked questions, links to articles on the issue and  
suggestions for how to lead discussions of the film after screenings.  
Among the advice offered is: “The film is neither for nor against  
Israel. It portrays Israelis in neither a good nor a bad light. The  
film demands an acknowledgment that life in modern Israel is far, far  
more complicated than ‘good or bad.’ There may be a temptation to  
treat the film as a commentary on current events in Gaza. We urge  
Jewish organizations not be sidetracked into a political battle that  
would strip art of its multi-valency. Rather, we hope to address the  
film in all its complexity and take the opportunity it offers to share  
the mixed emotions and ideas it sets flying.”[12]

This desire to avoid moral judgments and to emphasize the film’s  
universal, humanistic message is paralleled by the director’s own  
remarks. Upon winning the Golden Globe in January, as Israel was  
bombing Gaza’s captive civilian population, his only comment was: “My  
film is anti-war, and therefore, sadly, will always be relevant.” In  
an interview with the International Herald Tribune, Folman also said  
that his film “doesn’t deal with the other side, or what we do or not  
do to them. The basic statement is: War is useless. But there’s  
nothing you haven’t seen before or that we didn’t know: Sharon lost  
his job because of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila.”[13] As a  
matter of fact, Sharon was forced, after much resistance, to become a  
minister without portfolio, and as we all know his role in the  
massacre didn’t impede his eventual rise in Israeli politics.

But it’s not just that the outrage over Sabra and Shatila never led  
the Israeli military political establishment to reexamine its most  
bellicose proclivities. It’s startling to see how careful almost every  
reviewer of Waltz with Bashir has been to avoid linking the film with  
the massive Israeli bombing of Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009, which  
killed well upwards of 1,300 people, mostly civilians. There is, as  
Antoun says, something “perverse” in this disconnect.

The film is applauded for its courage in confronting a complicity that  
has long been part of the historical record. This confrontation ends  
up leading to redemption much more than to condemnation. And hardly  
anyone suggests that Israel’s current military operations should also  
be bravely examined. I suppose that we will have to wait for another  
award-winning film, a quarter-century from now, to do that.

[1] The researcher Mahmoud Kallam, a son of the camps, puts the number  
at just over 1,000. Of these, Kallam says, just over half were  
Palestinians; the remainder were Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians and  
others living in the camps, as do many working poor of non-Palestinian  
nationality today. Mahmoud Kallam, Sabra wa Shatila, dhakirat al-damm  
(Beirut: Beisan Press, 2003).

[2] For details, see the legal document prepared for the ill-fated war  
crimes case against ex-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Belgian courts: http://www.indictsharon.net/cmptENft.pdf 
. For more on that case, see Laurie King-Irani, “Does International  
Justice Have a Local Address? Lessons from the Belgian Experiment,”  
Middle East Report 229 (Winter 2003).

[3] See Julie Flint, “Vanished Victims of Israelis Return to Accuse  
Sharon,” Observer, November 25, 2001; and Robert Fisk, “Sabra and  
Shatila Massacres: After 19 Years, the Truth at Last?” Counterpunch,  
November 28, 2001.

[4] Jonathan Freedland, “Lest We Forget,” Guardian, October 25, 2008.

[5] Jason Harsin, “The Responsible Dream,” Bright Lights Film Journal  
63 (February 2009).

[6] A. O. Scott, “Inside a Veteran’s Nightmare,” New York Times,  
December 26, 2008.

[7] Quoted in Hamida Ghafour, “In Search of a Brutal Truth,” The  
National (Abu Dhabi), January 24, 2009.

[8] Ha’aretz, January 21, 2009.

[9] Freedland, op cit.

[10] Naira Antoun, “Film Review: Waltz with Bashir,” Electronic  
Intifada, February 19, 2009. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10322.shtml

[11] Tom Segev, “Waltz with History,” Ha’aretz, February 5, 2009.

[12] The Viewer’s Guide is accessible online at http://www.jewishculture.org/attachments/waltz/waltz_guide_packet.pdf 
.

[13] Deborah Solomon, “The Peacemaker,” New York Times Magazine,  
January 6, 2009.