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REEL THERAPY? MY DISAPPOINTMENT WITH "WALTZ WITH BASHIR"

Ari Folman has done something impressive with "Waltz with Bashir", a documentary about his memories of being a soldier in Israel's 1982 war with Lebanon. But his failure to acknowledge his own sense of guilt "leaves the film with a whacking hole at its heart," writes Josie Delap ...

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It was with trepidation that I shivered over to the Curzon cinema, round the corner from The Economist in London, one dank winter evening. A colleague and I were going to see "Waltz with Bashir", an animated Israeli documentary about Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon. Events about the Middle East in London tend to draw a regular crowd. When you’ve been to a few, the faces grow familiar, their arguments depressingly so.

The film was thought-provoking and the discussion started well. Yet the room soon descended into a predictably generic shouting match about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though the film concentrated on Israel’s responsibilities with regards to its war with Lebanon, people preferred to revisit questions such as whether Israel was a colonial state, whether the Palestinians should use violence in their resistance and who had suffered most. As the audience hollered over the moderator and speakers clambered over each other, I sat in frustrated silence, wondering whether it would be rude to sneak out the back.

An hour later, gratefully slurping a glass of wine with said colleague, we continued the debate, albeit with less rancour. "Waltz with Bashir" raises some interesting questions about the value of cinema as therapy.

“Waltz with Bashir” is a documentary that examines the experiences of a group of Israeli soldiers in Lebanon during the war in 1982. It sets itself apart from other documentaries by its use of animation throughout. Stylised figures in bilious yellows and leaden greys graphically illustrate a series of interviews with former soldiers, along with related dreams and nightmares. The use of animation allows the film to explore the hazy line between memory and reality, truth and hallucination in a way that would be impossible in a conventional documentary. The result is a compelling and visually arresting narrative of a man trying to unlock his past.
 
The inspiration for the film emerged in a bar one night--a scene recreated in the film. An Israeli man describes a recurring nightmare about his time as soldier in Lebanon to Ari Folman, the film’s director and protagonist. It is then that Folman realises that his mind draws a blank when it comes to his own experiences in Lebanon, when he was a 19-year-old soldier. Later that night, however, a vivid flashback reveals that he had witnessed two massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps on the fringes of Beirut in 1982.

The film is his attempt to fill in these gaps in memory. It is not, for Folman, a political take on what happened at Sabra and Shatila. Rather, it is a painful unpicking of layers of memories ignored and repressed for 20 years. “It was like scratching an old scar, an old wound,” he explained in an interview with the Guardian. “The memories spurted out”.

The symptoms that Folman and his friend present--memory loss and recurring nightmares--suggest that they have both undergone considerable trauma. But also that they are suffering from a persistent sense of guilt, specifically for these massacres. The Phalangists, or Lebanese Christian militias, laid to waste the refugee camps over the course of several of days, with Israel’s connivance. The Phalangists claimed to be targeting militants, but many of those killed were civilians. Casualty estimates range from 350 to 2,000.

Israeli soldiers did not participate in the killing, but they sealed the camps, making it impossible for residents to escape. They occupied high-rise buildings on their outskirts, from where they could surely see the horrors going on below. Folman was on top of one of these buildings--that much he remembers. He thinks he may have lit the flares that illuminated the night sky, facilitating the Phalangists’ grisly work, but he cannot be sure.

“A journey trying to figure out a traumatic memory from the past is a commitment to long-term therapy," Folman wrote in his press notes. He had been sceptical that making a film could be therapeutic, but he seems to have come around to the idea. "My therapy lasted as long as the production of "Waltz With Bashir": four years...If I was the type of guy who believes in the cult of psychotherapy, I’d swear the film had done miracles to my personality. But due to previous experience, I’d say the filmmaking part was good, but the therapy aspect sucked.”

Well, if you skip a vital section of your therapeutic journey, the therapy’s bound to suck. And skip it he does. Folman's failure to acknowledge his own sense of guilt leaves the film with a whacking hole at its heart.

In the film, Folman discusses his feelings of guilt with a therapist, who assures him that they stem from the fact that the Palestinian camps remind him of “the other camps”. (Folman's parents were in Auschwitz.) The therapist further explains that Folman should not feel responsible for what happened at Sabra and Shatila because he did not know why he had been ordered to light the flares. He was a young soldier, only following orders, not to blame for the hideous deeds of Israel’s allies.

Sure, Folman and most of the other soldiers he interviews in the film were low-ranking recruits with little choice but to go to war. In the midst of the conflict’s horror and chaos, perhaps they did not understand what was going on before their eyes. But when the film shows Israeli soldiers watching Phalangists executing entire families, it becomes harder to accept this idea (an idea that rarely exonerates the Nazi soldiers who presided over the "other camps", anyway). That Folman and his fellow soldiers could have done more, but did not, is something he doesn't address.

His own negligence during these few horrific days is at the heart of Folman’s guilt. The film touches on the culpability of the army authorities, and alludes to Ariel Sharon’s encouragement to the Phalangists. But for a film Folman describes as therapy, "Waltz With Bashir"'s failure to confront any of this is spectacular. No wonder the therapy stank.

"Waltz with Bashir" is a beautiful and thought-provoking film. It has been widely lauded, winning the award for best foreign film at this year’s Golden Globes and earning a nomination for an Academy Award in that category. But it left me feeling cheated: cheated of the resolution therapy can offer, a resolution that is only possible when feelings like guilt are dealt with openly, not reframed in an aesthetically pleasing but ultimately pardoning narrative of one’s actions.

During the post-film discussion, as things got more heated and people got more defensive, Ron ben Yishai, an Israeli journalist featured in the film and one of the panellists, exclaimed in exasperation: “Wars take a long time to digest. We have a lot of wars. We have digestion problems.”

Such things take time. German filmmakers are only now creating works that can comprehend the country's collective feeling of dread after the second world war. And the situation in Israel and on its borders is more complicated, as new generations on both sides continue to create horrific memories. But perhaps this is why works that more honestly and productively grapple with the psychological wounds of war is so desperately needed.

(Josie Delap is Countries Editor of Economist.com, and a contributor of daily news and analysis stories.)