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Review Dec 05 2008 « | »
Waltz with Bashir I went to see this brilliant animated documentary last night - a striking exploration of testimony, memory and trauma.......

Jon Openshaw

I went to see this brilliant animated documentary last night - a striking exploration of testimony, memory and trauma. Critical acclaim has rocketed it into the mainstream press, so you may have read a thing or two about it already...

The film opens with a pack of mad dogs tearing through city streets and overturning cafe stools. They are looking for one man; the first of director Ari Folman's interviewees - a childhood friend who he served with in the Lebanese war. He knows the dogs are looking for only him because he killed them one night in 1982, to stop them alerting a Palestinian neighbourhood to an impending purge.

Folman himself is not hunted by memories but instead haunted by a total lack of them, and this film represents his attempts to piece events together, long since repressed by the trauma of the conflict. Treating memory as a work-in-progress rather than a carbon copy, Folman weaves frank interviews with feverish hallucinations (in one sequence a naked giantess boards a boat before swimming away with a soldier nestled in her crotch).

These fantasy interludes imbue the narrative with a surreal fiction that lies over the basic horror of the content - a distorting screen that is echoed in the vivid hand-drawn animation. It is a documentary style that anticipates the audiences long-nurtured hunger for fiction in cinema. Just as Foldman and many of his interviewees have escaped a traumatic reality by distorting their memory through fantasies, so too is the audience allowed relief through visually stunning animation and an often grim humour. This hunger sated, we join Foldman's search for the seething underbelly of truth, constantly trying to enact the reality in our minds.

The inbuilt conflict between the real and surreal means that the Sabra and Shatila massacre comes as both inevitable and shocking. The comic book fantasy dissolves completely as hundreds of Palestinian refugees are executed whilst Israeli troops look on. As the film closes with real life news footage of the massacred Palestinians, the full force of Folman's transformation from son of Auschwitz survivors to genocide overseer is brought home.

For more info about it look here.

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