'Waltz with Bashir' Makes War Look Stupid

By Sheerly Avni, Truthdig. Posted January 1, 2009.

"I knew it had to be this way," he explained. "If I couldn't animate the film, I couldn't do it at all."

Folman and his animators filled the movie with dreams, memories and nightmares, all set to a soundtrack that alternates between rock music and Max Richter's haunting score: A pack of dogs running rabid and wild though the streets, an exhilarating sequence of young soldiers boogie-boarding at the beach (Folman admits this was an intentional homage to "Apocalypse Now"), a teenage soldier dreaming that he's being swum to safety by a giant naked woman, and, finally, Folman's only clue to his blocked memory: a recurring dream about emerging naked from the sea.

The film owes much of its visual impact to the artistry of Goldman and his animation team, but its dramatic tension derives from Folman's own Jason Bourne-style search for his missing memories. But when it comes time for the moment of revelation, the "Bourne moment" that might unlock his memory, Folman's friend Ori hits him with an apparent anticlimax: the suggestion that his obsession stems from a much earlier moment in history -- that his dreams are connected to an earlier massacre, an earlier nightmare.

"It's all about those camps," Ori suggests in the film. "Your parents were in Auschwitz. The massacre has been with you since you were 6 years old. … You felt guilty; you were cast for the role of the Nazi. It's true you didn't massacre. You just fired flares."

As a child of survivors, said Folman, he had long been preoccupied by questions of circles of responsibility during the Holocaust. "How much did they know? Did they realize there was a mass murder happening? How many knew what was going on in the camps?"

The same questions plagued him as he searched for his own memories of the Palestinian massacre, and as he spoke with soldiers who had been nearby. "What I learned was that people had all the elements, but they found it too complicated to put it together in one frame, because mass murder is not in our system. … You don't think that things like that are happening just around the corner, even if you are participating in a war."

In part, this is a particularly Jewish/Israeli problem, one which Folman does not shy away from: Is a culture that has experienced genocide more likely to recognize it the next time it appears? Not necessarily, says Folman, speaking personally again.

"For us who grew up in those kinds of families, are we more ready to listen to those kinds of stories? On the contrary, I think it is harder. The Holocaust was like a one-time experience in the history of humankind for us. We are not ready for anything else."

But Folman is adamant in insisting that there are no easy comparisons to be made between the Nazi murder of the Jews and the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla. "There is no comparison, there can be no comparison. But mass murder is mass murder, and it is something that the imagination cannot believe or accept, even while it is happening."

War is horror beyond human comprehension: This is the theme of "Waltz With Bashir."

"This film," insisted Folman, "could have been made by an ex-American soldier in Vietnam, a Russian in Afghanistan, an American today in Iraq. … It could have been made by anyone who wakes up one morning and finds himself hundreds of kilometers away from home, in a remote city that has nothing to do with him or his life, nothing whatsoever. He doesn't know what he's doing there, he is terrified, and he has no clue."

Asked if working on the film had turned him into a pacifist, Folman answered: "For that I didn't need to make a movie. I became a pacifist by my second day in Lebanon."

Click here to see clips from "Waltz With Bashir."

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Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco writer.