In Waltz with Bashir, Is-raeli film director Ari Folman breaks new
ground. Screened at the To-ronto International Film Festival, the film
is, by his reckoning, the first full-length animated documentary in the
history of cinema.
Revolving around Israel’s controversial 1982 invasion of Lebanon, it’s inspired by Folman’s experiences as a young foot soldier in that war.
Folman, who is based in Tel Aviv, was drawn to the topic after he turned 40 and asked the army to excuse him from further re-serve duty. Having made that request, he was referred by the military to a therapist.
In therapy, he realized that there were many “black holes” in his memory concerning the war, and that he had a need to investigate that tumultuous period in his life. Folman had forgotten, or repressed, the first day of the war, as well as the Sa-bra and Shatila massacres, which occurred in west Beirut as the war wound down.
In an effort to piece together the story, Folman consulted friends and acquaintances who had been there and could refresh his memory.
Indeed, Waltz with Bashir unfolds as Folman meets an old friend at a bar in Tel Aviv. The friend, Boaz Rein Bus-kila, recalls a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by a pack of wild black dogs nipping at his heels.
The dogs are not a figment of his imagination. On the first day of battle, Buskila was given a special assignment. He was ordered to shoot bay–ing dogs in a Leb-anese village that was being surrounded by an Israeli patrol.
Having successfully forged a connection between Buskila’s nightmare and the war, Fol-man went on to talk with several other vets, a war correspondent and two therapists, all of whom assisted him in filling in the blanks.
In an interview at the festival, Folman said he went through “a major psychological upheaval” during the four years he and his associates laboured on the film. As he put it, “I discovered a lot of heavy stuff about my past.”
From the outset, Folman intended to portray the war through the medium of an animated documentary, proceeding from the assumption that this form would give him untrammeled freedom.
“War is so surreal, and memory is so tricky, that I thought I’d better go along the memory journey with the help of some very fine illustrators.”
In fact, the animated documentary was not entirely new to him. Years before, Folman directed a TV series, The Material That Love Is Made Of, in which he opened each segment with a three-min-ute animated scene. “It worked so well that I knew a fea-ture length an-ima-ted doc-umentary about the war would even-tually work.”
Waltz with Bashir, however, began its creative journey as a video and then as a story board that was transformed into an animated documentary.
Folman initially supported the war. But on the second day, he abrup-tly chan-ged his mind. “It was not a defensive war. We were not defending our coun-try.”
He said Israel moved way beyond its stated war aims, as enunciated by the prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin. “The war was a turning point,” Folman said. “There was a total breakdown between the people of Israel and the lea-dership of Israel.”
In addition, due in large part to the the Sabra and Shatila incident, in which the Christian Lebanese Phalange militia killed as many as 2,000 Palestinian civilians within sight of the Israeli army, Folman concluded that war is a bloody-minded exercise in futility.
He and his unit were stationed only 300 metres from the two Palestinian ref-ugee camps that were attacked by the Phalange, Israel’s ally. “We didn’t see anything, but we heard shots all night,” he recalled. “We were ordered to fire flares, which helped the Phalange.”
In his view, Israel could have stopped the massacres much earlier.
Folman also opposed the 2006 war in Lebanon, signing a petition against it. “It seemed like deja vu.”
Rightly or wrongly, he is convinced that Ariel Sharon would not have laun-ched that war had he still been prime minister. “He learned his lesson in 1982, when he was defence minister. He was a clever guy.”
According to Folman, Waltz with Bashir -– which was hailed at the Cannes Film Festival as a powerful and compelling film and is scheduled to open in Toronto next winter –was well received in Is-rael on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.
Folman, whose family immigrated to Israel from Lodz, Poland, in the 1950s, studied film after completing his army service and returning from an extended trip to southeast Asia.
“Film, for me, was a natural way to ex-press myself as a storyteller,” he explained.
His graduate school film, Comfortably Numb, which dealt with the 1991 Gulf War, won the Israeli Academy Award for best documentary.
From 1991 onward, he directed television documentaries, mainly on Israel’s presence in the territories.
His first feature, Santa Clara, based on a novel by a Czech author, garnered seven Israeli Oscars.
In the near future, he plans to make an animated film about a world controlled by a pharmaceutical com-pany. “It’s science fiction,” he said.
Folman is confident that Israel and the Palestinians will settle their differences within a two-state solution.
“But we don’t have the right leadership for that to happen now,” he said, adding that former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin could have pulled off this feat had he not been assassinated.
