The Fluidity of Memory

 

Israel, 2008

directed by Ari Folman

 

I have a memory that does not exist.

 

I am six years old, vacationing in Mombasa, Kenya, with my mother and various friends, standing on the beach in a garish floral print bathing suit. I am watching my mother swim in the deceptively tranquil waters of the Indian Ocean. She is waving to us, her body so far out that she almost blends in with the limitless horizon. She waves and we wave back, laughing as the water laps at our feet, tickling our toes. She continues to wave and we continue to wave back, until the horror of realization breaks upon us. She is not waving–she is flailing, and I am running toward her stumbling on the wet sand and surf, but getting no closer to her as she disappears beneath the treacherous water…

 

Now, there are several reasons why this memory is not real, not the least of which is that my mother is very much alive and an ongoing inspiration in my day-to-day life. But the images sometimes enter my brain, and it is difficult to tell the difference between reality and imagination–the texture of the sand, the smell of the salt air, and the very present fear of losing someone irreplaceable grip the very core of my being.

 

It is this type of simulated reality that kick-starts the visually stunning, beautifully compelling odyssey created by writer and director Ari Folman in his critically-acclaimed animated documentary Waltz with Bashir. His “memory,” a vision of himself and two other Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers bathing in the ocean the night of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres during the 1982 Lebanon War, sparks his quest to fill the gaping holes in his personal history during that time period. Through narration and innovative animation techniques, Folman pieces together a series of disturbing yet poignant scenes of a murky time in Israeli history.

 

The majority of Waltz with Bashir covers the events of September 1982, when IDF soldiers were charged with guarding the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and allowed Lebanese forces, wounded and vengeful from the murder of their beloved president-elect Bashir Gemayel, to enter the camps unchecked. The result of this decision was the mass slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children. To this day there is debate over the extent of the IDF’s responsibility for this travesty, and Folman focuses on the moral ambiguity of these actions during the bloody massacres through the real-life experiences of the men who lived through it.

 

Regarding cinematography, the film draws comparisons to the gritty, sepia-toned graphic novel films like the commercially successful 300 and Sin City. But instead of tricky camera work and filters, Waltz with Bashir employs a different type of media entirely, merging simple animation with sketches of sweeping land- and cityscapes that gives the viewer the feeling of walking through an art book. Combined with an appropriately haunting soundtrack that blends dark electronic undertones with 1980s popular punk music, Folman’s work transcends the run-of-the-mill, action-packed mayhem of recent war cinema and elevates Waltz with Bashir into a league with the difficult-to-execute, heartrending slice-of-life war narrative.

 

The Homer-esque journey to personal enlightenment that Folman goes through has the potential to be a gripping Hollywood tragi-drama in its own right, but the use of actual veterans, all perfectly masked by portrait drawings to skew their true identity, turns Waltz into an epic parable of the war experience, and specifically the mysteries of the human psyche. Folman introduces this concept early on with the incorporation of a discussion between himself and his long-time friend and fellow filmmaker, Ori Sivan. Straying slightly from the film’s narrative style, Folman discusses his “memory” with Sivan and questions the validity of this vision. He wonders why it suddenly appeared twenty years after the fact and after only one conversation with a fellow veteran. Sivan sagely replies: “Memory is fascinating… [It] is dynamic. It’s alive. If some details are missing, memory fills the holes with things that never happened.”

 

It is the idea of the fluidity of memory that sweeps through seamless transitions from narrative to narrative, highlighted by animated recreations of the story as it is being told. Folman asks nothing of his subjects, their accounts made all the more affecting by the fact that they are his friends, and allows them to say the words, “I don’t know.” As every memory is revealed, spun sensitively with allowances for personal bias, we see first-hand just how dynamic and dangerous delving into the subconscious can be. Even the film’s small diversion from the war narrative in Folman’s interview with Israeli psychologist and researcher into the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, Zahava Solomon lends credence to the ever-changing nature of memory, specifically by those affected by war.

 

Folman never overtly apologizes for the revealed atrocities carried out by him, his fellow soldiers, the Israeli government, and Lebanese forces, nor does he justify them. He, like the majority of the Western world, recognizes that the systematic murder of hundreds of men, women, and children cannot be excused, making this point by comparing the atrocities of the Lebanon War to those of the Holocaust. Though criticized for portraying the IDF in too positive a light, Folman’s lack of conviction on the subject just adds to the complexity of the individual’s experience in war. Like his memories, Folman simply allows the facts to be, and in the process gives the rest of the globe a glimpse of a world that so many have heard about, but only a few have experienced directly.

 

 

 

In the film’s finale, the audience is privy to an even more heart-wrenching view of this world: Folman transitions from animation to actual footage of the bloody, tragic aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. As though waking from a beautiful nightmare into a Technicolor reality, the actual faces of the victims and the shrieking, hollow cries of the survivors mark Waltz with Bashir and Folman’s true moral apex: memories are dynamic, fascinating in their complexity, but reality cannot be fluid, and is devastating in its cold, unbiased truth. While memories fade and skew with time, the consequences of a single action remain abundantly clear in the emotions those memories leave behind.

 

 

 

frontispiece: still from Waltz with Bashir; photos: still from Waltz with Bashir, Palestinians massacred at Shatila Refugee Camp, photo by Robin Moyer (1982)