March 5, 2009
I finally got around to seeing Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s rapturously received animated documentary about Israel’s first Lebanon War. It was a tremendously upsetting experience, on a number of levels.
The film’s much-celebrated technique — documentary and staged footage transformed into animation — is indeed astonishing. It lends a haunting beauty even to images of horror and destruction. And the story it tells is horrific: a middle-aged Folman’s attempt to recover his memories of the war and, specifically, his — and by extension, Israel’s — culpability in the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.
The film raises questions, for me at least, about the internal and external conversations we have about Israel — the ones we hold in the family vs. the ones we hold for the “outside” world. Of course in the Internet and cable news age, those distinctions become almost meaningless, and yet we still cling to them, as if we can get away with “talking amongst ourselves.”
Folman’s film is unassailable as an internal Jewish and especially Israeli conversation. Israelis have been having this conversation since Christian militiamen slaughtered the Palestinian residents of the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps as Israeli soldiers stood by — and especially after Israel’s official Kahan Commission found Israel’s leaders “indirectly responsible” for the massacres.
Bashir resurrects the pain and disillusionment of this era in a way no straightforward documentary could. Folman stands in as a member of a wounded generation, one that hasn’t healed from the scars of what Israel regards as its first unheroic war. As a contribution to an internal dialogue about Israel’s specific traumas, and perhaps to an external conversation about the wages of war, the film — like Platoon or The Burmese Harp — is a classic, powerful and above reproach.
But Bashir was burning its way through movie houses and award ceremonies just as Israel entered into yet another searing war against a Palestinian terrorist adversary, fought yet again in a maze of crowded allies and “refugee camps.” While American editorial pages remained largely supportive of Israel’s efforts to repulse Hamas rockets, the war sparked a firestorm of anti-Israel press and activity around the world. Into this maelstrom drops Folman’s film, whose subjects include conscience-ridden Israeli recruits, indifferent commanders, Palestinian corpses, and the director’s own epiphany involving his parents’ internment at Auschwitz.
These are the subjects of a great work of art. But I watched the film gripped by the anxiety that they would also become fodder for diabolical propaganda. I can imagine this film being screened for two groups, one pro-Israel, the other pro-Palestinian. The first would applaud its honesty and self-scrutiny; they would note how the Israeli government’s support for the movie is a testament to the humanity of Israel’s citizen soldiers and the country’s willingness to interrogate itself. The pro-Palestinian group, meanwhile, might see the film as evidence of Israel’s longstanding indifference to Arab lives (see the indiscriminate night-time shooting! Watch those “smart bombs” go astray!).
For Jewish audiences, the film is Israel’s Red Badge of Courage; for Palestinians, it’s the Zionists’ The Battle of Algiers.
Truth be told, Bashir hasn’t been enlisted in any Palestinian propaganda efforts that I know of. And the Palestinian cause doesn’t need an Israeli cartoon to whip up anti-Israel hysteria — not while Gaza still smolders and Al Jazeera is doing its job. On that count, I can’t agree with Israeli film director Katie Green, who writes in The Jewish Week that she is relieved Bashir didn’t win the Oscar for best foreign film. Green complains that the film lacks context (she’s right) and will one day be seen as causing Israel “irreparable damage.” She wonders of Folman “if the artistic expression of his feelings on film are worth all the rage and hatred that will be stirred up against Israel as a result.”
Again, how much has that rage to do with Bashir? It’s not even being shown in Arab countries, which bans Israeli films, no matter how self-critical.
Bashir doesn’t endanger Israel; it does, however, make Jews profoundly uncomfortable. A few weeks ago I argued for a wide-open conversation and Jewish debate on the Gaza war, as a way for us to fully engage with Israel beyond the propaganda and talking points generated by our side. But I left out the part about how those conversations are infinitely more comfortable when held around a Shabbos table or in an Upper West Side coffee shop than on CNN or the local multiplex.
But to what degree is an artist responsible for my “comfort,” or anybody’s? Folman’s film left me with a deeper understanding of the experience of Israeli soldiers and veterans than I have ever gotten from a fund-raising appeal or an anodyne prayer said in synagogue. But it also left me shaken, pining for Israel’s lost innocence, enraged at the Palestinians who drag Israel into endless battle, angry too at the Israeli leaders who take their bait.
Would I prefer not to have seen the film or that it hadn’t been made? That’s something I have to work out on my own, off-camera.
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