Dances with death
Ari Folman remembers the day nearly four years ago when he walked on stage at a conference at Hot Docs, Toronto's annual international documentary film festival, to convince 40 television and film producers from around the world to back his new project, Waltz with Bashir. The subject of the film was controversial: Israel's war in Lebanon in 1982 and the Israeli army's role in the infamous massacre of Palestinian civilians at two refugee camps in Beirut.
But the filmmaker realised it was another aspect of the film that was difficult - the fact he wanted to make it as an animated documentary. 'Thirty-eight out of the 40 people said, 'It's a nice story - but why animation?',' says Folman. 'Look how narrow-minded the film industry can get. [If it's a] story about a soldier trying to regain his wartime memories, no problem. Videos of massacres at the end? Horrible pictures? No problem with that, too. Do whatever you like. But animated real people? No, no, no.' One of the two who didn't question his premise put some money into the project.
Opening at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Waltz with Bashir is one of the most remarkable films ever made about that war, if not about war in general. It unfolds as both a documentary, with interviews, and a hallucinatory trip, with former soldiers' experiences presented in animated fantasy sequences.
Having won the best foreign language film award at the Golden Globes last month, Waltz with Bashir is favoured to win the same title at the Academy Awards (tomorrow Hong Kong time).
A firm believer that 'war has no glory', Folman admits he was inspired by films which use surreal imagery to lampoon the absurdity of war. Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, for instance, is one of his reference points, as is the surfing scene in Apocalypse Now.
Folman's tribute to that happens at the end of his film. After a long shootout around a deserted junction in Beirut, an apparently deranged Israeli soldier grabs a weapon, jumps into the centre of the road and begins to shoot randomly at buildings around him, all of which bear vast portraits of Bashir Gemayel, leader of Lebanon's Christian militia and the new president-elect. The spray of gunfire at Gemayel's likeness alludes to what follows, when the politician's assassination leads to Phalangist militiamen heading into the Sabra and Shantila refugee camps and slaughtering more than 3,000 Palestinian men, women and children.
While the massacre was taking place in the camps, scores of Israeli soldiers were stationed around their perimeters, shooting flares into the night sky and blocking the exits. Among those who were there was the then 19-year-old Folman, who says he didn't know what was going on inside the camps as he stood guard outside. He realised what happened soon afterwards - it would have been hard not to, given that 400,000 Israelis soon took to the streets of Tel Aviv to condemn the actions of their military. But he never thought about the episode again, nor his other experiences in Beirut.
Folman began to question his past when he asked for a permanent release from military service in 2003; he was by then already a full-time screenwriter and director, and only spent a month every year as a reservist, making information films for the army.
'They said, 'If you want to go, please go meet our shrink every week for a couple of hours',' he says. 'I was sitting there, and I told my story every week for a couple of hours for seven sessions. When I was finished I was not stunned by the story; I was stunned by the fact that it was the first time I had told myself what happened. And after some research I can even say I'm a lucky guy, since I think that compared to what other people went through, I really went through nothing.'
Waltz with Bashir revolves around Folman's determined pursuit of his lost memories as he talks to his former army colleagues about their experiences and how they coped with them. And they fared much worse than him, many suffering nightmares about their time in Lebanon. The film's first scene - in which a pack of 26 rabid dogs race along Tel Aviv's streets - is a recurring dream of Boaz Rein-Buskila, who in Beirut was assigned to kill dogs to prevent their barking giving away troops' presence.
By dredging up these repressed memories, Folman has succeeded in making an emotionally charged film that transcends its animated appearance. He's adamant that comparisons with Richard Linklater's Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly - both of which also transformed real action into animation sequences - are beyond the point. 'If you are busy [examining] the technique ... and comparing it with a Linklater film, I have to say I missed you,' he says.
His apprehension of audiences seeing Waltz as just a cartoon led him to end the film with archive documentary footage of the aftermath of the massacre.
Folman says it's more useful to compare his film with other movies about how soldiers behave in pointless wars. 'I think this film could have been done by an American ex-soldier who was in Vietnam or a Russian ex-soldier in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and, of course, it could be done now in Iraq.'
Still, the filmmaker says he doesn't believe film can change the cyclical nature of history, and events bear that out: Waltz with Bashir won six titles at Israel's annual film awards, the Ophirs, yet the Israeli government showed no hesitation in launching a brutal offensive in Gaza recently. Folman says he sees Waltz with Bashir as a 'mission'. It is to be hoped that amid the drums of war, it's not a mission impossible.
Waltz with Bashir opens on March 12
