Waltz with Bashir

I went to see “Waltz with Bashir,” the Israeli, Oscar-nominated animated film about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, with very mixed feelings. I’ve been curious to see the film since I first heard of it. Yet especially after the events of the last month I didn’t feel particularly inclined to give $12 to an Israeli project. And I feared the film would be an offensively self-centered view of the war, in which we are meant to sympathize with Israeli soldiers for the inhumanity they were forced to exercise and witness. But I told myself I should investigate.

So first of all, as a work of art, it’s stunning. There’s something dreamy yet realistic about the style, as if reality has just been “covered” with a drawing, filtered through an imagination. It allows for seamless transitions between battlefields, dreams, memories, visions. I at least have never seen animation work of this kind. There are many images that linger long afterwards, which is appropriate, since one of the themes of the work is how we remember (or forget), how the mind processes trauma. 

As for the content. It’s well-plotted, well-edited, smart, sometimes funny. Yet it is one-sided, of course. Much as in any American film about the Vietnam War, in “Waltz with Bashir” it is only the Israelis who are the protagonists of the story–Palestinians and Lebanese figure as victims, villains or distant threats.

The film’s framing device–which I found a bit artificial–is that the protagonist can’t remember where he was or what he did in Beirut on the day of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. He has several meetings with old friends and his shrink, who tells him that his interest in the massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps is also about his obsession with those “other” camps his parents were in. (I wasn’t sure what to make of this reference–on the one hand, it seems a provocative comparison between what was done to Palestinians and done to Jews; on the other hand, must everything in Israeli discourse always be understood in terms of the Holocaust?)

The massacre at Sabra and Shatila is the culmination of the film, and it is rendered clearly and precisely. In fact, the end of the film is emotionally wrenching. And, as if out of a desire to emphasize the reality of what happened, the film concludes with documentary footage (although some reviewers have viewed this switch as a shortcoming). 

Yet there is obfuscation over the Israeli role in the massacre. We are told that Ariel Sharon was called by a journalist that night and told that a massacre was taking place; he replied “thank you for bringing this to my attention.”  Israeli soldiers surrounded the camp while Christian Lebanese Phalangists killed Palestinian civilians inside, and Israelis even shot flares that night to provide better visibility inside the camps. Yet the protagonist says to his friend “The penny never dropped. We never realized they were carrying out a genocide.” 

All viciousness is ascribed to the Phalangists. The Israelis, like the protagonist, are distant, disconnected, confused–they don’t know what they’re doing there. None of the Israeli soldiers seem to have any ideological convictions, or any animosity towards the Palestinians. And a montage that shows the violence of the war set to rock music is again very reminiscent of American Vietnam movies–even as we are meant to condemn war, our military might and the youthful recklessness of “our boys” are portrayed in a thrilling way. 

We’ve all had the experience of enjoying a work of art and then having someone nit-pick at its political positions. I’m sorry to be that spoil-sport today. Artists aren’t obliged to make political statements. Yet to do a semi-documentary film about an invasion and a civilian masscre (and reap the artistic accolades and financial rewards for doing such “serious” work) demands that one ask–and answer–serious questions. “Waltz with Bashir” has good intentions (one witness compares the surviving Palestinians emerging from Sabra and Shatila to Jews coming out of the Warsaw ghetto), but it doesn’t follow through. It wants credit for acknowledging (in the film, it’s presented as a discovery of sorts) Israeli complicity in the massacre, something that has long been part of the historical record. And yet it leaves questions of causality and responsibility in the war and the massacre hazy, thus making sure it doesn’t alienate any part of its potential audience. 

If I knew nothing about about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or if I was less heartsick over the events in Gaza in the last month, I might have thought “Waltz with Bashir” was a great movie. But it just seems a bit rich that Israelis should invade their neighbors, kill civilians, and then win Oscars when a quarter-century later they produce art about their flashbacks and moral self-questioning (which never ends in outright self-condemnation). It makes me particularly heartsick that none of the lessons of Lebanon seem to have been learned. In fact, we can probably look forward to a film, 25 years from now, in which a former Israeli soldier will ask his friends and shrink: “Were all the 1300 Palestinians we killed really “terrorists” or “human shields”? Where was I and what did I do during the bombing of Gaza?”

0 thoughts on “Waltz with Bashir”

  1. “a bit rich that Israelis should invade their neighbors, kill civilians, and then win Oscars when a quarter-century later they produce art about their flashbacks and moral self-questioning (which never ends in outright self-condemnation”

    Agree completely, very well said.

  2. The movie never quite makes the final leap of “oh, perhaps Israelis should stop supporting their governments wars if they want to stop doing terrible things”, does it? It never acknowledges that possibility. You’d never know that there are in fact hundreds of Israelis refusing to serve, dozens of whom have been jailed for it.

    There’s a phrase for the Israeli left in Israel, the zionist left, “yorim v’bochim”–they shoot and cry about it later. The non-zionist left replies “Lo yorim, v’lo bochim.” If you don’t shoot, you don’t have to cry later.

    The question I’ve been flummoxed with is: as a supporter of the Israeli boycott, is it okay to tell my friends to see this movie so they at least understand a little bit of whats going on?

  3. Maybe I’m alone in this but I really like picking apart and debating political subtext, even of things I really enjoy; I never got why it makes so many people so defensive.

    Great review, thanks for writing it.

  4. I too found the film flawed in some important ways. And I am troubled by Folman’s silence on Gaza – at least so far I’ve not been able to find any comment by him on the latest carnage. To his defence, he did speak clearly against the Lebanon 2006 war, as it was raging, and was denounced in Israel for doing so as a Hizbulla supporter.

    I don’t agree with you on the “obfuscation” regarding responsibility to the massacres. Folman leaves it to the viewers to form their conclusions and in this sense he respects the viewers’ intelligence.

    The main problem for me was the lack of interest in the Palestinian viewpoint, the lack of an attempt for a dialogue.

    I invite you and other readers to read my political response to the film
    (http://jerusalemmink.blogspot.com/2008/12/waltz-with-bashir-review.html)

  5. Not trying to give you an overdose of Israeli movies, but I highly recommend a six or five year old Israeli documentary called “Arna’s children”, there’s no gray areas in that one, just absolute nightmarish misery and sadness and inhumanity that I imagine it would take any person with a hint of a soul some time and effort to get it of his mind and try to forget he ever saw it.
    By the way, that’s seriously one of the smartest and well written reviews I’ve read for movie. You should work for Harper’s or the Nation.

  6. Mohamed, I totally agree with you about the effect of Arna’s children (I felt like I was punched in the stomach really hard).

    But there are a gray areas even there: the fact that the maker is half Jew, half Arab, yet the kids in the refugee camp see him only as “Jewish”, someone from the “other side” (at least in the beginning). And there is a scene which stuck in my memory where his mother, the Jewish communist activist, recalls having taken part in ethnic cleansing in 48, she states it almost as a matter-of-fact thing, and a second later she steps out of the car into Jenin’s refugee camp, embraces everybody around her.

  7. I always wondered about the scene where she talked about the ethnic cleansing, and what the reasons were for choosing to put it at the end. I always thought it was full of grey areas though, not making any of the characters out to be one-dimensionally good or bad or victims, that’s what I liked about it as opposed to a lot of documentaries that tell a similar story.

  8. Mink, I think she mentioned the ethnic cleansing of the arabs that she took part in as the biggest regret of her life, not a thing that she took lightly. I know a lot of people who had the same punch in the stomach feeling after watching the movie.
    I thought Nadia that the clear victims were those kids, keeping in mind that as unbelievable as it is all of them (with the exception of one) died very violent deaths.

  9. You are right, Mohamed, she does mention it as the only thing she regrets, but from what I remember it takes her time to say that (I think at first she says she regrets nothing), and her tone – well to me it felt that she’s not agonising about it, at least not concsiously, because she’s not the agonising type, she’s the activist type, she wouldn’t spend years thinking of the wrongs she did in the past, she’d rather do things to correct the past. What a remarkable woman. So much energy and enthusiasm, while she was dying from cancer.

  10. “that the clear victims were those kids,”

    What, that’s obvious. What I meant was that it didn’t overly idealize anyone, from what I remember, and avoiding oversimplifying their portayal, which is any easy thing to do with an emotional subject.

  11. Thank you all for your comments. As far as the director’s stance on Gaza, I found this quote:

    “My film has a very strong anti-war declaration,” Folman told the Reuters news agency, adding that he is among a minority of Israelis who opposed the recent military assault on the Gaza Strip. “If you are a believer in non-violence like me you ask yourself if everything is being done to prevent the next conflict and in this case I think, ‘no’.”

    (http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090124/PAGETHREE/311673820/1119)

  12. I thought it was a wonderful film. I cried afterwards. The newsreel footage of the weeping Palestinian widows and the bodies underneath the rubble was too much for me. I just hope that people will relate this to Gaza and connect the dots. Kind of disappointed that Ari Folman hasn’t spoken out as much as he could have on the Gaza massacre. Maybe he’s afraid of the backlash he’ll receive in the US media?

  13. I appreciate your thoughtful review, though I’m wary of the idea of boycotting artists because of their citizenship. (A lot of badness resides in a lot of countries.)

    I don’t know how self-aware one can expect the Israelis to be. More aware of their misdeeds than citizens of other countries? Maybe the obligation of self-knowledge – knowing why you do what you do, and truly knowing how it affects others – is commensurate to the power you wield. Or maybe the obligation is commensurate to the amount of say you have in how your society is run. In either scenario, Israelis have a huge burden (as, of course, do Americans).

    But it’s a rare citizen, of any state or society, who is willing to go all the way and connect the dots from atrocity and oppression to him or herself. Ari Folman went as far as he did and may feel that he’s gone all the way.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *