SCREEN MEMORY IN WALTZ WITH BASHIR

Garrett Stewart

A cartoon anti-war movie? In Avi Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), given an Israeli combat plot cast into flashback within an animated story of post-traumatic stress disorder and memory loss, what kind of hurdles to political conviction or even good taste does this animation erect? Or what ironies release? Following on from all the contemporary war films about American incursions in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan (with the digital blitz of their high-tech quasi-documentary treatment),¹ what is Waltz with Bashir after in returning us not just to a former Middle East bloodshed, but to the literal drawing board?

Despite assumptions in the press, there is no rotoscoping (digital tracing) involved. The technique is ‘cut-out animation’, with the videotaped movements of real actors used as rough models for the ‘animatics’ of a ‘videoboard’ whose subdivided jigsaw shapes are only then fed into a computer programme that calibrates the sectored rhythms of human movement. Though the level of kinetic detail has been limited (as Folman explains on the DVD commentary) by his electronic production budget, such constraints are in fact cashed out stylistically, with the film’s troubled bodies, heavy with dream and guilt, wading through a lurid quagmire of deflected memory. The nightmarish atmosphere is offset by such hyper-cinematic gestures as warp-speed transitions between Dutch and Israeli locales or battleground overviews higher than any crane shot, steadier than any helicopter pan. In line with the developing ironies of psychic artifice in the film, these effects are not just associated with surrogate visual memories; they are surrogate cinema.

Twenty-five years after serving as a teenager in the Israeli army during the early 1980s occupation of Beirut, a middle-aged director sets out to discover why he has so completely blocked the memory of a notorious massacre of Arab civilians carried out by Israeli allies, the Christian Phalangists, in reprisal against the assassination of the newly elected Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel. Only later in the film does a friend suggest that the director, Folman, must have distanced his role in this whole operation from the start, since policing the Palestinian camps, let alone facilitating a mass extermination, would have been intolerable for a child of Auschwitz survivors to reflect upon. Rather than see himself as a Nazi, he took refuge in illusion.

But his private mirages are hard to sort out from the toxic phantasmagoria of combat, which, according to Folman, assaults the mind like ‘a bad acid trip’. Right from the start, the film’s palette is eerily acidic. The animators have found just the right sulfuric glow for the delirium and mayhem. With a gangrene orange saturating one bombed-out urban space after another like a stain rather than a hue, bodies flow past in their fragile animation as if struggling to keep life in their limbs. And in contrast to the shell-shocked canvas of metropolitan Beirut, we get the occasional beachside or sylvan respite exploded by violence. In one of the most mordantly gorgeous episodes, we look on at a sun-speckled forest ambush in which, with a web of shadows turning Israeli uniforms into a balletic animated camouflage, a pre-teen Arab boy comes out of hiding to fire a rocket grenade straight through our line of sight into an approaching tank.

In a film about scrambled memories painfully drawn out of hiding, Folman’s narrative is especially difficult to remember in the exact order of its realist flashbacks and its delusional cover stories. As a psychic topography, it amounts less to an autobiographical through-line than to the layering of a collective unconscious. The surreal opening nightmare of ravening dogs unleashed on an Israeli street sets the pattern for subsequent flashbacks sprung from the separate monologues of former soldiers. The friend who tells the director of this recurrent dream explains how he was too green a recruit to be trusted with killing enemy combatants, so he was assigned instead to the shooting of dozens of dogs to prevent their warning yelps. Plunging us unprepared into the gruesome nightmare that haunts him years later, the film thus begins in anticipation of its own dead end: a howling revenge for the slain that will later, when fantasy has been scoured away, emerge as an accusatory human chorus of mourners.

In the next interview, we see in flashback another friend’s escape from seasickness into the absurdist vision of a giant naked woman on whose breast, maternal and erotic at once, he floats off while the rest of the crew is bombed. Based on second-hand reports like this, the climactic revelation for the Folman character is that a languid swimming episode in the pre-dawn, flare-lit sea, his one recurrent flashback, is a defensive fiction as anaesthetising and desolate as it looks. This is the spectral leitmotif that erupts at three separate points, less often than one might remember, and not with the echoing of a charm but as its own gradual exorcism. Neither of the two friends rising naked with him from his remembered Mediterranean interlude zombie-like but still armed, recalls the event at all. Locating him outside the circuit of killing in this alternate picture of male camaraderie, Folman’s numbed skinny-dipping fantasy is of course as much a libidinal sublimation of carnal violence as is that other soldier’s hallucination of sea-borne feminine salvage: each a regressive fantasy at once oceanic, laving and amniotic – as well as an amphibious flight from the nightmare of all those boots on the ground. In this somnambulism of disengagement, Folman goes night-bathing with his buds while others conduct the bloodbath – only for him to remain, afterwards, quite at sea about the facts this fiction has kept submerged. Denaturalised further by the unnerving electronic score (Max Richter’s accompanying music is entitled ‘The Haunted Ocean’), such are the condensations and displacements of the traumatic unconscious in the protective mind’s eye.

These figurative means for keeping himself in the dark, his guilt at bay, stand in contrast to alternate visual mediations familiar in part from other recent war films and their ubiquitous digital replays of Middle East violence. Certainly every chance Waltz with Bashir gets, it throws the chromatic and somatic estrangement of its own animation effects into relief against the recessed treatment of other media, regularly dropped back into black-and-white format so as to forefront the alternate intensity of the prevailing narrative mode. Like zones of grisaille monochrome cordoned off in oil painting, these include everything from an aerial surveillance monitor tracking a self-guided missile in the bombing of an Arab neighborhood, through black-and-white photos repeatedly pinned-up in the background of separate interview sessions, to an abrupt detour into the exaggerated historical fidelity of pre-colour treatment to animate a World War II anecdote about furloughs from the Russian front. Then, during Folman’s own bleak leave in Haifa, there are alternating broadcast images of a political harangue and a rock video on a storefront’s bank of TV monitors, all the screens blaring in their own anachronistic version of jittery black-and-white focus. These appear just before he passes a video arcade and sees, in full colour this time, a Desert Patrol war game, exactly the garish digital simulation of combat pyrotechnics that the cautionary animation of his own film rejects.

The building impact of these embedded photomechanical and electronic mediations helps orient an extended filmic conceit about psychological blockage. When Folman consults a trauma specialist, she mentions another soldier who, being ‘an amateur photographer’ before the Lebanon War, staved off the ‘horror’ of its carnage by the ‘dissociative’ maneuvre of seeing everything – through an ‘imaginary camera’ – as a parade of merely ‘great scenes’. At just this point in her monologue, we get a series of separate animated rectangles decelerated to a graphic novel’s equivalent of cinematic freeze-frames. Reverting to the single drawings that underlie the narrative’s whole technique, these combat shots turn the postures of a continuous battlefield tension and ravage into instantaneous poses. ‘Then one day the camera broke’, says the psychologist in voice-over. Suddenly a dozen or so still shots rush by in a vertical file with sprocket noise accompanying the 35mm roll, as if serial record were clutching at filmic motion in the moment of its dysfunction.

Indeed the psychiatrist’s own terms have slipped, across a simile, from photography to movie-going, for her patient ‘had used a mechanism to remain outside events, like watching a film’ of the war rather than participating in it. Completing this photomechanical emblem, the last two frames of the broken roll don’t just flutter past but settle into place to reveal moving images in their own right, one animated miniature screen on top of the other. Once the prophylactic ‘mechanism’ has broken down, the perils of real time seem to be breaking through. Even the smallest increments of the track register an involuntary index of history in passing: the tattered banner at the Beirut Hippodrome flapping overhead to the left of each jammed, stacked frame. No matter how much the mind tries to lock down such disturbing pictures, their incrimination will return from the repressed, in this case precipitating a long panning shot across a circus of horror strewn with the bodies of slaughtered ‘Arabian’ horses – until we close on the convex blur of a fly-swarmed eye, where an anonymous soldier sees his own reflection in death’s brute anamorphosis.

This pitiable instance of shot/reverse-shot in the same organic lens points straight – along a similar ocular axis – to the exchanged points of view at the film’s close. On the way there, and to complete the motif of the dead eye, we hear of a hellish urban hinterland known as the ‘slaughterhouse’, where everything is ‘like an LSD trip’, including the spectacle this time of human rather than equine Arab bodies viciously desecrated, their organs and limbs exchanged in macabre triumph. No sooner is this memory dispatched on the soundtrack by another interviewed soldier that we see, sped past as if in revulsion by the camera itself, the gouged-out retinal globe and optic nerves of a swollen eyeball in a formaldehyde jar.

Following this monstrous flashback, the final interview with a renowned TV journalist, who was formerly there on the scene in Lebanon, summons the image of his cameraman crawling along on the ground in front of him to keep beneath the line of fire. With ‘women, children and old people’ crowding the high-rise balconies, the seasoned reporter was stunned to see them watch the gun battle raging around him in real time ‘as if it were a film’. But when the kind of video footage his crew was actually there to record is shown to us in the end, it seizes attention with the disjunctive force not of a film but of unmediated recall. Here is on-site video retrieved from the vaults – but no longer the tomb – of memory and made present, as if in its original sighting, to Folman himself at last. Burst through the labours of animated reconstruction is the true archive of terror – and the final trope of recognition. You had to have been there. The trouble is that Folman was – and must now take up the video image by proxy as his own admitted view.

To earn its culminating disclosure, Waltz with Bashir must of course dismantle the screen memory of those naked swimmers safely adjourned from the murders and all but drowning out their guilt under cover of darkness. In each repetition of this shielding fantasy so far, the three men return to the morning streets still buttoning up their fatigues, with the Folman character leading them straight toward the camera. At that point, however, alone in the frame this third time, he turns a corner past posters of Bashir and finds his line of motion slowed by a procession of grieving women in pantomime, their wails symptomatically dialed out by the electronic score. Though in reverse directions, paths visibly intersect. He is already in the thick of things. But this isn’t ‘factual’ either, any more than was his enervated idyll in the sea, from whose false dawn he must awake. Both the lulling retreat, bracketed off from political reality, and his return to the fray in the aftermath of violence is linked cover stories. The actual reality lies between, rests in fact on a more candid marking – and impossible bridging – of the admitted distance between: a distance more rigorously acknowledged at last, even while being visually traversed in the closing camera movement. What memory has involuntarily spliced together of this sundered experience until then – the defensive sea dream and the terror that still infiltrates it – is their final disjunction, where Folman must recognise himself not immersed in suffering but confronted by it from his own official if rapidly vanishing distance.

Folman knows now that he was always present at the atrocities, but only on the outskirts, standing guard with fellow Israeli soldiers at the perimeter of the camps, looking the other way during the orgy of executions. With the beach fantasy shattered, its closing interpenetration of on-duty hero and the inexorable tread of Arab grief is replayed finally at the truer remove of his disengaged complicity: that of an emotionally detached onlooker forced finally to see – and, by suddenly direct sound, to hear. On the brink of recovered memory, he is separated now across the gulf of a rapidly telescoped long shot. Animation again generates a hyper-cinematic effect, a preternatural tracking shot burrowing through the train of bereft women with more precision than any Steadicam, closing by its own force the distance between their virtual funeral march and Folman’s sentinel duty in the distance. The intervening and despoiled no-man’s land, previously elided in the dream’s commingling of Folman and the suffering women, here yawns between them to mark the breached gap – across time as well as space – between a censored private vision and the returned look of mass grief.

Closing upon the formerly glazed eyes of denial, the pinioning camera bores in on a prolonged close-up of Folman in his emerging awareness – until the abrupt reverse-shot seems to echo and complete, in an analogous vector, the early assault of the Arab rocket in our direct line of sight. By this point, however, it is any remaining screen of fantasy that is exploded on contact with the approaching spectacle of pain. Overtly yanking him back to the aftermath of slaughter as it actually transpired, we see as if through his eyes a montage of 1982 documentary images of bereavement, then death itself. There is nothing knee-jerk in the resulting spasm of ocular recoil. The shock is knowingly twofold – and first of all in its visual letdown. Until now we’ve never seen screen images like Waltz with Bashir’s, whereas we’ve seen all too much Middle East affliction on TV. Throwing us back on the too familiar, the sudden visual privation is as barren as it appears.

But in no way facile or anodyne. There is no formal capitulation to routine verité, as some reviewers have objected, in this plummet through a hyperbolic, computer-assisted imaginary to the analogue real; nothing pat about the 180degree turn from show-stopping graphics to a straightforward graphic violence. After all the animated soul-searching close-ups, there must, at any aesthetic cost, be real faces looking back. And a fact faced – no longer masked or countenanced. After all the artful pains taken to picture the veils of repression, the actual pain: real mourners and – following that sound video – real corpses as if beginning to disintegrate in an even grainier file of soundless and nearly still frames, none of them ‘great’ shots at all, let alone photographic buffers against the event. After the screams of grief, its cause: absolute final silence. After so much animation, and our gradual acclimation to its spooky allure, its opposite in rank death.

We don’t know for sure who took these documentary images, if or when they were ever broadcast, whether or not they correspond to what Folman was positioned to see on the scene. All we know is that, in the mental recognition they emblemise by the initial eye-line match of this distended reverse-shot, the agonies they index are now meant to be, as they once weren’t, felt. By their insistence – over against an animated image to whose mode of visualisation we never return – the Folman figure has been taken finally, and the film with him, beyond the cartoon world of his deferred witness and the earlier phantasms of his self deceit. In a jolt to our vision as well, a decisive shock of recognition, past atrocity is rerun as full-frame recall.

Screen memory gets erased form within by video trace. But the pivotal wrench of transition has been dialectical rather than reductive, let alone cathartic. Documentation dislodging fantasy turns fantasy itself into a document of disavowal, the superseding archival footage into a ghostly apparition – as much a haunting by history as its straightforward record. Though cut loose from actuality over the course of the film, an unconscious screening-out of one’s guilt is no less true than the archived bloodshed it papers over with the desperately etched imagery of denial. The retreat to virtuality (and its techniques of animation) is therefore as much a record of the ordeal, in its psychic response, as is the video transcript of flailing misery. Together they are the truth of trauma, spelled out as such only in collision – and searing aural overlap – in these final moments, whose dialectical clash pictures each in the other’s terms.

Prerecorded human sounds, mostly articulate voices, have anchored the film’s recovered memories throughout, though usually suspended in the episodes of hallucination. In the last sequence, the keening grief of the approaching women is on the track (for the first time in this third iteration of their image) well before we enter the assailed vision of the hero, switching there from painted frames to the recorded source of the wails in live-action despair. After all those webcam and satellite transmits in other Middle East war films, those hand-held or unmanned captures that keep death at arm’s or armament’s length, after all that contemporary ‘period style’, here both ears and eyes are opened to a moral abyss that still cannot be mastered, neither faced down nor fully faced up to, but which remains all the more blistering for the images previous arisen to repress it. Less an unflinching acknowledgement than a residual haunted-ness, the act of mourning that now swallows up the film is its own. The narrative reversion from drawing to automatic record has come with a cinematic suture from which no healing is to be had.

NOTE

The author and editors are grateful to Film Quarterly for allowing the chapter to be re-printed.

 

1    See my essay ‘Digital Fatigue: Imaging War in Recent American Cinema,’ Film Quarterly, 63, 4, 45–55.