David Polonsky, art director of the animated documentary film Waltz with Bashir (2008), lives and works as an illustrator and art director in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Joram ten Brink: The film is about war, trauma, memory and trying to recover images of war. Waltz with Bashir is extraordinary in the way it takes documentary and pushes it into areas beyond representation of war; how do we understand war and violence through animation?
David Polonsky: I think my main concern was not to get carried away with the aesthetics of war. Because it’s really easy to make ‘pretty pictures’ that are very effective and very dramatic within a film on any war. One of my main concerns was to try to avoid pathos. And try not to show beautiful explosions and interesting splashes of blood. It sort of directed me to a more modest and restrained style of drawing, because we didn’t want to glorify war in any way. And because it’s so easy to do it in animation and in painting … like when you see paintings of historic battles … they’re beautiful! So that was one concern. On the other hand we had to be communicative, to carry emotion, in a good way and also in a dramatic way. It needed to be dark, and a little scary of course, so that’s the simple reason why there are so many blacks in the film; it’s darker that way.
JtB: The main character in the film says that the landscape was beautiful and pastoral – southern Lebanon with its olive groves, fields, orchards, and so on. But there’s very little of the beauty of the landscape and the city in the film. On the soundtrack everybody talks about Beirut being a beautiful city, with its big villas, beautiful streets, the beach…
DP: I did not want to illustrate the text because it was beautiful, but because it was also devastated and scary. And the point of view of the film is of the soldiers themselves. Many of the landscapes – as I couldn’t go to Lebanon myself and I’ve never been there – were basically drawn from what I know to be very similar to Lebanon, that’s the northern part of Israel where I grew up. So I drew the old Haifa/Tel-Aviv road, with armoured vehicles along it. And the light, the dust, the floor, everything is the same. But it’s disrupted by war.
JtB: And the idea of using animation to investigate trauma and memories of war?
DP: That was Avi’s idea [Avi Folman, the film’s director]. Throughout the whole film there were many decisions taken; one example would be the use of photographs within the drawings. I use bits and pieces of photographs in the background, but there is not one frame of the film that is absolutely clear; everything is reinvented and shifted around, and so that’s the way it addresses the nature of memory and its subjectivity. The result is that the viewer is perplexed – is it true or false? Is it made up or ‘real’? So that addresses this aspect of memory. And then there’s the nature of dream and it results in different pace to events, that is supposed to carry you into an almost hypnotic realm.
JtB: The dream is the first thing we see in the film…
DP: Yes. It’s not just the visuals, it’s the pace itself, and of course, later, the music. It’s repetitive; it has an episodic structure. Each time we get too close … at the moment we get too involved and things get too sad, or too scary, or too hilarious, we switch the story; we start a new story, new cycle, it’s kind of poetic device. I’m saying this in hindsight; it wasn’t planned. Until eventually, it’s abruptly cut. There is no redemption.
JtB: The film contains different stories and experiences of war – that of the soldier who was stuck on the beach, Avi’s story, the Dutch…
DP: …and the guy who stormed the beach after having the dream … losing his virginity (this is the macho guy who danced) … So the film is made up of a great number of episodes. Actually, the preliminary script had two more episodes, it was even more diverse, and the final film had to be a little bid toned down.
JtB: It had to be toned down because in the end we do get into a very traditional ending, as the second half of the film becomes about Sabra and Shatila…
DP: I wouldn’t go as far as saying that the film is about Sabra and Shatila, because there’s nothing new about what we say about Sabra and Shatila. There’s no journalistic value whatsoever in the film. It’s a personal story, it’s as much about Sabra and Shatila as it is about repressed memory.
JtB: But the repressed memory of Sabra and Shatila is the most important one in the film, or that is how it is perceived?
DP: Yes. So for the reconstruction of the memories I used references, mainly from the Internet, some old newsreels, and again remembering Haifa, my home town.
JtB: The memory is built on the tension between the soundtrack made of a pure old-fashioned documentary interview and your drawings that could not be further from documentary. The image of Bashir Gemayel himself is the only real image cut inside the drawings…
DP: [laughs] It’s actually a picture that I drew … well, it looks like him but there isn’t a picture of him exactly like mine…
JtB: But it’s the nearest reference to a real photographic image…
DP: There are of course also the guys themselves, those who are telling the stories, the interviewees. In a way there’s nothing really new in a documentary animation. In fact, I think, the first surviving animated sequence, that still exists today, is about war, it’s about a warship that was sunk.
1 The drawing of the warship was about the spectacle. A lot of short animated films are what you would call documentary. So the idea is not new. It’s new in feature format, I don’t know of another feature-length animated documentary. In some aspects it’s even more truthful than a traditional documentary, because when you photograph or shoot in video you have the pretense of truth. You declare that what you are showing is the truth whereas you may be manipulating it in countless ways, through editing, music, whatever. In reconstruction especially, when you stage a reconstruction within a documentary, you, as a viewer have to suspend your disbelief watching the actor before you. Whereas, when you draw it you eliminate the middleman. Once again it doesn’t even pretend to be real, it’s just telling the story, like any other documentary. Before we started working on our film, we looked at
Touching the Void [Kevin McDonald, 2003], and we were influenced a lot by the nature of its construction, because in that film you know that these are not the people who are being interviewed, but there are many cinematic devices, which cause you to forget this. And that’s okay.
JtB: One of the strongest images in the film is the image of washing the blood in the back of the troop-carrier after the delivery of the wounded soldiers. It is a long shot with only a little blood drawn. In certain places it looks like a graphic novel … As an experienced illustrator who works in diverse styles, how did you arrive at your decision about the particular style of the film?
DP: It’s kind of circumstantial that the look is ‘graphic novel-ish’; I wasn’t thinking of graphic novels, although it later became a graphic novel in a way. I wasn’t thinking about it when we were working on the style. We had a lot of technical restraints … it couldn’t be too stylised, too ‘caricature-ised’, because we were trying to create this feeling of ‘participation’ and the moment you stylise a character too much you cannot make your own presence very evident, so it had to be fairly realistic, with real proportions. At the same time it had to be very expressive, very strong, involving the viewer. Or, it had to be just very intriguing visually. So that’s the reason for the black outlines and the dramatic colours etc. Together it works out that it looks like a mainstream American graphic novel, but that wasn’t what we were aiming for in the beginning.
JtB: Was there a struggle in the design between How do I represent violence and how do I represent memory? Where is the truth? As the film is digging deeper and deeper into the psyche of our man?
DP: I think first of all just the choice to tell the story in animation is what makes the biggest difference. The rest, the political considerations, are very important but they are secondary. The main thing is that you realise that we are dealing with memory and inner journeys and the fact that it’s done through drawings. You realise that the voice is ‘real’ and that the image is fabricated. So you see that the images are the manifestation of something subliminal, something that you don’t obviously see in the world but that came out of somebody else’s mind. In a way it’s a method of turning yourself into a third person. It is like when you need to make a mathematical calculation – you write down the numbers to multiply. You know how to do it in your head and you ask yourself – why do I need to make a mark on the page? Because you take this knowledge and you look at it from the outside. In the same way, drawing lets you look at what’s in your mind.
JtB: You chose to give the overall film realistic dimensions – in its proportions; the skyline of an Arab village, of an orchard, of the military vehicles, even the figures are human-size…
DP: This is the manipulation we were trying to create. That if you were making something that is too inventive, you wouldn’t carry the audience. You have to pretend to be neutral.
JtB: And the one extraordinary scene on the love-boat where he jumps…
DP: But we say it’s a dream so it’s okay.
JtB: The whole film is in a fact a dream, also the dogs are a dream … But the dogs are treated in a very realistic manner; through using the camera’s positions – the dogs run toward you, they knock the chairs on the street … it’s hyper-realist almost…
DP: In a way, yes. But it’s a delicate balance between two different directions. One is to express yourself to the maximum and the other is to remain truthful. And the very simple way to describe this in drawing is to create naturalistic drawings.
JtB: You were never inclined to draw something non-naturalistic in style; to delve further into the world of trauma and the memory of war … adopting a naturalistic style may also tone down the nature of war and its representation…
DP: I’m not sure; if you think, for example, of Francisco de Goya and the drawings of the Napoleonic wars in Spain, which were gruesome and vivid. I don’t think there is anything more powerful, a more powerful depiction of war. And if you think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, which is much more expressive and free in terms of style, it’s also an extremely strong painting, an amazing one. But if I choose which gets me in the gut, it’s Goya’s, it’s not ‘Guernica’, the beautiful ‘Guernica’. It’s so beautiful. It’s not really scary. And when you look at tormented corpses hanging from the trees it’s … And yes, these are all different artistic/aesthetic decisions, but if you look at the same time what [Goya] has done to depict war … you see many things; the composition, the nature of the lines, everything. And it’s realistic. I think it’s by nature, it’s who I am; it’s the way I work. I work consciously, thinking a lot about the works from Germany in the late 1920s, by Otto Dix and those guys, namely, the New Objectivity. Again there’s this kind of expressionism but with restraint, with this pretense of objectivity, that’s why it’s called New Objectivity. I will show you in my film what I think about the officers, you know the caricature … I’m going to show you it as it is, I’m going to exaggerate but pretend that it’s journalistic.
JtB: And that will fit into the bigger picture of the film as being a documentary?
DP: Yes. This is Avi’s way, it’s not exactly mine … but I go along with it, because I find it very exciting – this kind of extreme expression. It’s not trying to show complexity. He knows what he wants to say and he’s out to say it. It’s not about nuance. And my job as a designer is to add nuance and not to go along with the grandeur of the statement.
JtB: It was a new adventure for you, the first film you’ve ever done?
DP: Yes, it was fun. I had some experience of animation for television, so I had some understanding of the process, and then again, I’m not doing it alone, there’s a process that places me in a very convenient position to start drawing. And that is Avi, and Yoni Goodman, the director of animation, and myself. We’d met and discussed each scene, and then Yoni would proceed to make a storyboard. They were very rough drawings initially; you realise that you have a long shot of the street, with an ‘American’ shot of two figures from the knees up. And then I had a lot of freedom to create the atmosphere, the specific look, in which the street, the lighting, the characters themselves … whatever, but I do have an image. And that’s different to my usual illustration work where I choose, where I’m also the director, and that what takes up most of the time and thinking. But with the film where the story is being told in many other ways, I was more free to go into the details and tell the story by showing the posters on the wall, or choosing a colour, and so on. But I’m a little bit ‘pre-directing’ and helping things that are already in the script or storyboard. The primary choice, to use animation, was Avi’s, and that was the most important artistic decision in this film. Everything else is an interpretation of this idea.
JtB: And the idea came to Avi because he was trying to deal with war and memory in a different way, or he didn’t believe that a documentary film made of a set of interviews with his friends would be satisfactory?
DP: Actually we had that film – interviews with fiends. It exists. First of all it was filmed, and we had a straightforward talking heads documentary with all the interviewees. I know that Avi was looking for a way to tell his story about the war for a while but he just didn’t see any reasonable way, because to make another documentary … we’ve had enough of those, especially here in Israel. But the possibilities he gets from animation, to move freely, to reconstruct cities and so forth are immense. We have worked together on another project that was also a documentary, and it had little bits of animation, and I think there he realised that he can try it on a larger scale. Everything on the screen is your decision; it’s absolutely the opposite of usual documentary. If you have an interview, and the interviewee takes a long pause, or he deviates from the subject, you have to throw it out. In a ‘regular’ documentary it’s very difficult to do because you see the jump cut. In animation it’s acceptable.
JtB: Was there any time that you were worried that this kind of animation, or any kind of animation, would actually damage the degree of believability in the story about the Lebanon War?
DP: No, we didn’t think so. And actually it’s not the most important thing for us to make people think that it was ‘real’. It’s very important, but it’s not the most important issue. It’s not a journalistic film, it’s not about the truth; it’s about the process of discovery of memories of war, which is something else. Of course the live sequence at the end is there to make sure that everybody realised it’s true. That it’s not made up.
JtB: And you got a lot of flack for it…
DP: For the last part of the film? Yes, we did.
JtB: I don’t have a problem with it one way or another. The filmed images are not more dramatic than the drawings. The drawings of the dead children in the rubble and those of the killing of the old man are as powerful as the ‘real’ footage.
DP: I don’t know; there were a lot of arguments against this and some for it. I think it works, again, not for moral reasons but for aesthetic reasons. Because the film has an episodic structure, the moment you break the device, you make it clear that this will not continue. The film is based on cycles of beginnings, followed by ‘something’ becoming very dramatic, very stressful, and then ending with the ‘start of a new story’. And this is the most violent way you can break the story in the middle. By using the live footage in that way, you leave the audience waiting for the end, and in many screenings we noticed that people sit throughout the credits. It’s not because they’re interested in reading my girlfriend’s name, it’s because they’re waiting for the end. I think, in fact everybody realised that it’s the end, but emotionally we’re on this wave and it’s broken in the middle, so it’s kind of ‘what next?’ feeling. This is the kind of feedback we got from audiences.
JtB: In a sense the first scene is the film’s strongest.
DP: Yes, some say that.
JtB: Alongside the last section with the filmed footage – these are kind of strong bookends to the film. The first scene in the film really gives you the shivers. It draws you into the film with the men looking down through the window, through ‘the window of the mind’…
DP: I didn’t think of that…
JtB: …and you see the dogs that are running on their own; there’s very little detail, as an image … as an image of violence. It is an image of memory of violence…
DP: Which again has many precedents in art. You have the expression ‘Dogs of War’.
JtB: That type of ‘full-blown’ violence, in long shots, in close up, full of energy, they are moving … fast … the dogs are almost more threatening than the tanks in the film.
DP: Because they have eyes! The tanks don’t have eyes. And it was my choice to use the stretch of the street in Tel Aviv, because it’s the heart of bourgeois Tel Aviv. It’s the ‘safest’ place in the country because Tel Aviv feels itself to be protected from the madness and violence around. This street is at the heart of the seemingly protected bubble. So I chose to bring the dogs into the heart of this ‘safe’ place.
JtB: And the dogs bring back the horrors of the past, of war … the nightmare of the trauma…
DP: The best part is that it’s true, in a way. It’s really a dream that a friend of ours dreamt. In fact it was even more gruesome, but it didn’t connect very well to the rest of the film.
JtB: The explanation for the image appears much later in the film…
DP: Yes, so you don’t know what you’re seeing at first…
JtB: But the images are not repeated…
DP: No, but you do see them again in his memory, when he actually shoots the dogs, and you have the explanation.
JtB: But the violence is restrained then…
DP: Yes, it’s only one dog, and in his dreams there are 26 of them. The dream was even more gruesome, too gruesome for our film…
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