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Movie Day: Waltz to Bashir
Feb. 21st, 2012 11:42 pmFor film studies today, we watched Waltz to Bashir as part of an examination of how the world other than the United States have treated animation in a different way than here, and for the study of Israeli film-making. I remembered being aware of this piece of awesome-sauce when it won the Golden Globe (I think) in 2009 for Best Foreign Language film, and then lost the Oscar to Departures. Having finally watched both.... Waltz to Bashir was fucking snubbed.
I will henceforth call it "WtB," and so what I hadn't known until now about "WtB" was that it's an animated documentary film about how director Ari Folman had a vision of his time during the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, but was unable to confirm what the vision meant since he couldn't remember his campaign in Lebanon as part of the Israeli Defense Forces, nor could he even convince himself which part of it is true and which isn't. So he starts a journey to contact fellow veterans of that campaign of their experiences in the Lebanon War because they were all in Beirut at the same time as he did with the hope that they would provide clues with Folman's vision.
The central theme is that memory is a living thing, and that our mind always fills in the blanks to gaps in our memory to form a whole picture; this ties in to the detective-like nature of Folman's interviews from several people in his unit, as each member of the unit remember their time with the surreal backdrop of their memories, which follows their sensations from the experience more than the clear facts of the event. Folman himself wanted to decipher the meaning of his vision, because he feels strongly that he is somehow an essential part of the massacre, but the elusiveness of his memory blurs sensation and reality when trying to piece together that part of his life story.
One of the telling quotes from the film regarding the theme is this:
“Memory is dynamic, it’s alive. If some details are missing, memory fills in the holes with things that never happened.”
Another is: "You can draw, but no filming," when Folman asks a comrade to sketch him and his son playing in the snow.
What I got from that film was that this was how it best represents animation as an essential component to providing a narrative voice. What I interpret from it is that animation best represents real-life events greater than any live action filming could ever do in due to the simplicity of the work and how it oftentimes presents difficult themes in a manner that's easy to translate. Although most of the film is told by the flashbacks of different people, those events are animated and directed in a way to recapture the feelings of the person telling the story and how they perceive their lot in the war. The film is visceral and large in interpretation as the audience also has to piece together fact and possible fiction from the stories that each soldier tells in their experience in the war.
I will henceforth call it "WtB," and so what I hadn't known until now about "WtB" was that it's an animated documentary film about how director Ari Folman had a vision of his time during the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, but was unable to confirm what the vision meant since he couldn't remember his campaign in Lebanon as part of the Israeli Defense Forces, nor could he even convince himself which part of it is true and which isn't. So he starts a journey to contact fellow veterans of that campaign of their experiences in the Lebanon War because they were all in Beirut at the same time as he did with the hope that they would provide clues with Folman's vision.
The central theme is that memory is a living thing, and that our mind always fills in the blanks to gaps in our memory to form a whole picture; this ties in to the detective-like nature of Folman's interviews from several people in his unit, as each member of the unit remember their time with the surreal backdrop of their memories, which follows their sensations from the experience more than the clear facts of the event. Folman himself wanted to decipher the meaning of his vision, because he feels strongly that he is somehow an essential part of the massacre, but the elusiveness of his memory blurs sensation and reality when trying to piece together that part of his life story.
One of the telling quotes from the film regarding the theme is this:
“Memory is dynamic, it’s alive. If some details are missing, memory fills in the holes with things that never happened.”
Another is: "You can draw, but no filming," when Folman asks a comrade to sketch him and his son playing in the snow.
What I got from that film was that this was how it best represents animation as an essential component to providing a narrative voice. What I interpret from it is that animation best represents real-life events greater than any live action filming could ever do in due to the simplicity of the work and how it oftentimes presents difficult themes in a manner that's easy to translate. Although most of the film is told by the flashbacks of different people, those events are animated and directed in a way to recapture the feelings of the person telling the story and how they perceive their lot in the war. The film is visceral and large in interpretation as the audience also has to piece together fact and possible fiction from the stories that each soldier tells in their experience in the war.
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