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Waltz with Bashir

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by Emily Robinson
Waltz with Bashir tells the story of director Ari Folman’s quest to find out what really happened in the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war. Although he fought in the war, Folman is shocked to discover that he has no memories of it. The fim follows him as he visits and interviews old friends, trying to piece together their fragmented memories and to awaken some of his own. It is a mesmirising exploration of war, guilt, memory, witness, psycho-analysis and comradeship.

But what really makes Waltz with Bashir stand out is its animation. It is beautifully drawn and the haunting, haggard images stay with you in a way that live action would struggle to match.

The animation brings a whole new level of interest to fairly standard talking-head scenes. I found myself transfixed by the details in the background – bottles on a shelf, a child playing outside. It also means that hallucinations, dreams and memories are given the same visual treatment as the talking-head scenes or as the photographs which the veterans use to substantiate their memories. Sometimes the whole thing feels like a fictionalisation; the opposite effect to documentaries which intersperse interviews with live witnesses (holding real photographs) with live-action reconstructions of their memories.

This is really the crux of the matter. The whole notion of an animated documentary raises a raft of questions about truth, authenticity and the barriers between fact and fiction. Especially when we know that the film was fully scripted and shot in a studio before being animated. For instance, in one scene Folman and a former comrade drive together in a car; this was shot with Folman and an actor sitting on studio chairs, holding a toy steering wheel.
Reading the production notes, it is difficult to pick your way through this layering of fact and fiction. The script was based on real interviews, and some of the interviewees played themselves in the live-action version of the film on which the animation is based. We hear their actual voices, repeating a scripted version of their own words. And we see an animated version of them. Yet other interviewees refused to be shown in the film. Their voices are spoken by actors and their animated faces are a complete fiction. But it is still (presumably) their own words.

Does any of this matter?

I don’t think so. Many documentaries blur the line between fact and fiction. The fact that Waltz with Bashir is animated simply makes this process more transparent than most. We know that what we are seeing is not what actually happened, that some kind of mediation has taken place. The question is how much? In a film about the shifting nature of memory, narrative and interpretation, this seems singularly appropriate. Rather than attempting to create a false impression of authenticity, by using live-action reconstructions, the film unsettles our very notions of what is real and what is not. It reminds me of Baz Luhrman’s preference for ‘real artificiality’ over ‘artificial reality’.

Waltz with Bashir is a beautiful, compelling attempt to create a truth from fragments of images, from second-hand stories and from the deeper recesses of the director’s subconscious. In a very real sense, the whole film is Folman’s ‘truth’. But the film isn’t content to remain in the territory of relativism.  It leaves us in no doubt about what really happened in the Sabra and Shatila regugee camps. The final scene breaks into news footage: Folman’s search for memory has led him to authenticated ‘history’.

Directed by Ari Folman, Israel/ Germany/ France 2008, 90 mins

Released in UK cinemas 21st November 2008

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