The film’s last, powerful gesture-the sudden switch from the animation of Folman’s flashback to actual footage of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps immediately following the massacre-signals more than just a final act of remembering. These variously disorienting transformations motivate the film’s masterful and creative use of animation, which is consistently employed to represent both the surreal qualities of war itself and the thin, permeable border separating the external, the actual, and the comprehensible from the internal, the imagined, and the inscrutable. In other words, this is less a film about a war or a massacre than it is a treatment of what happens to a historical event once it becomes a memory, a trauma, or a repression gradually returned. Waltz with Bashir revolves around a particular historical moment, and is thus interested in an actual past, but the film is much more concerned with subjective encounters and echoes of this history, that is, with visions, dreams, flashbacks, hallucinations, and the mechanism of repression. A travelogue is reconstructed, each of its different stations newly revealed under the light of active recollection.įolman employs his film’s central technique, that of animation, to investigate the rich, real-imagined tension that lies at the movie’s core. The narrative steadily illuminates this network, giving the film a simultaneous spatial and temporal vector: Folman, he relearns, entered Lebanon at the start of the war in June 1982 and traveled north into Beirut, just before the massacre in September. The film’s entire trajectory has been the steady uncovering of a vast network of repressed or lost memories, a network tracing out Folman’s experience of the First Lebanon War. Folman, the filmmaker/protagonist, finally recalls his experience of the massacre in Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, which took place more than twenty years earlier.

This climax arrives not by way of dramatic action per se, but rather through a last instance of recovery. The climax of Waltz with Bashirz comes only a minute before its conclusion. This matter of passivity should raise concern since it resonates with the place Sabra and Shatila occupies in Israeli collective memory of the First Lebanon War. That being said, the film’s profound closing moments also have the effect of foregrounding Israeli passivity in regards to the events it represents. Through its innovative use of animation, this film offers an illuminating treatment of the relationship between history and memory, while at the same time ingeniously reenacting and even enlarging the experience of witnessing. Ari Folman’s 2008 animated documentary Waltz with Bashir is a genuinely remarkable film. Credit: Ari Folman and David Polonsky/Sony Pictures Classics.

Waltz With Bashir by Ari Folman