Bashir’s Waltz is an animated film by the Israeli writer/director Ari Forman about Israel’s first Lebanon war in 1982 and the infamous massacres in the Palestinian refuge camps, Sabra and Shatila. The story is told like a documentary built on a dozen or so interviews conducted by Ari Forman’s with his former army buddies.
It’s a disarming approach. The animation is not sophisticated and clever like Pixar’s or starkly primitive like Persepolis. It’s more like a graphic novel with twitchy, South Park-type movement added from time to time. The individual images are rendered sparely but artfully, even soulfully, capturing the essence of a personality, the mood and sensual ambience of a place and time. It’s a very unusual approach because it’s obviously animated but at the same time feels and sounds like a documentary. It takes a few beats for the mind to decide how seriously to take this film. And that’s one of the things that makes Bashir’s Waltz so effective a cinematic poultice for old, still painful wounds: animation gets more easily under the radar of the conscious mind and has a better chance of reaching the deep, dark and scary stuff locked safely away in the unconscious.
For Israelis, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila are about as dark as it gets short of the Holocaust. Before the founding of Israel is 1948, the Jewish people were a nation without a nation state for almost 2,000 years. Relentlessly pogrommed, cruelly bounced out of every nation in Europe, Jews managed to survive by clinging fiercely to the hope of redemption. Next year in Jerusalem, for most, was the dream of creating a modern Jewish state in Israel. But for Jews redemption also meant being ‘a light unto the nations. ‘Among other things, that meant creating a society with an unwavering commitment to social justice and never, ever, oppressing weaker people as we were oppressed for so very long.
Sabra and Shatila signaled something entirely different and unthinkable: Jews were the same as everybody else. While the Israeli Defense Forces did not themselves kill any civilians in the two Palestinian refugee camps, they did allow Lebanese Phalangist militiamen to enter. The Phalangists, who had been trained and partly supplied by the Israelis, had a long history of animosity with the Palestinians. When these Lebanese soldiers murdered 300-3,000 Palestinian civilians (the number is still contested but not the crime) world opinion put the smoking gun solely in Jewish hands.
Israeli’s Kahan Commission investigated the event and concluded that Ariel Sharon, head of Israel’s Defense Ministry at the time, bore personal responsibility for "ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge" and for "not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed." Sharon resigned but the shameful, shattering memory of these events continues. It’s the Israelis’ Abu Ghraib or My Lai, a body blow to the nation’s heart, heritage and legacy.
Forman’s film opens at a bar with an old friend of Ari’s telling him about a recurring nightmare he has of being chased by 26 vicious dogs. The men take it as a metaphor for their army experiences in Lebanon and realize that they’ve both completely blanked out that period of their life. Resolved to remember lost things, Ari embarks on a quest to interview old army buddies.
It’s a disarming approach. The animation is not sophisticated and clever like Pixar’s or starkly primitive like Persepolis. It’s more like a graphic novel with twitchy, South Park-type movement added from time to time. The individual images are rendered sparely but artfully, even soulfully, capturing the essence of a personality, the mood and sensual ambience of a place and time. It’s a very unusual approach because it’s obviously animated but at the same time feels and sounds like a documentary. It takes a few beats for the mind to decide how seriously to take this film. And that’s one of the things that makes Bashir’s Waltz so effective a cinematic poultice for old, still painful wounds: animation gets more easily under the radar of the conscious mind and has a better chance of reaching the deep, dark and scary stuff locked safely away in the unconscious.
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I don’t remember ever seeing Israeli soldiers humanized (or mocked, depending on your point of view). That seems courageous. Israel has been operating in 9.11 mode since the day it was born 60 years ago when Arab forces rejected the UN vote creating the Jewish state and attacked it. Things have only gotten worse. The IDF is widely perceived to be the reason Israel’s four million Jews have not been pushed into the sea, as the Islamic nationalists like to say, by its 80 million presumably hostile Arab neighbors. Could be. But deconstructing the myth of military heroism is a good start towards building a healthier society and a stronger nation.
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