More On Waltz With Bashir

I saw Waltz With Bashir at the Salem Cinema yesterday. I hope that many people will go to see this animated film, but I especially hope that the people who most need to see it--the people who are pro-Israel or who think that there are still "good" wars or the people that need some inspiration to remain anti-war or people who don't know about the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982--will go.

It is remarkable that this film could be made, distributed and shown even with its shortcomings. The film concerns war trauma, subjective and collective memory, nationalism and particular atrocities committed by the Israeli Defense Forces and the Lebanese Phalangists. The Israeli political and military establishment and the dominant factions among the Phalangists, now billed and misunderstood as populists in western media, have conspired to cover up the 1982 events with silence and denial and we only rarely hear about Israelis questioning the dominant ideology of nation-at-any-price so deeply set in Zionism.

The film succeeds in its art and in its story-telling and in its search or insights into the deepest questions of life in a time of war. You do not have to have a sophisticated grasp of politics or history to appreciate this film. In fact, the film simplifies events in order to make its main points accessible to a wider audience. It does this without hammering viewers with a line. Had the film been made in a traditional documentary style--if it could have been made and marketed in this way--it might not have had its essential humanist dimension and would have been more easily marginalized as propaganda. Certainly the art inherent in such outstanding animation would have been absent.

The animation is so good in its detail that it may take more than one viewing in order to fully appreciate the artistic dimensions of this film. Viewers are likely to get wrapped up in the film's narration and how the story line develops. The last minutes of the film will shock an audience out of the narration which carries the story and into the reality of what is at the heart of the film after all.

The film fails in not explaining the larger and darker forces behind the 1982 massacres, who assassinated Bashir Gemayel and why and the full impact of Lebanon's civil war. We do not hear the voices of the Phalangists at all and we do not hear or grasp any part of the Palestinian narrative until it is too late. These stories deserve to be told. On the other hand, it is important that we hear the stirrings of conscience from within Israel, and particularly from soldiers who were in Lebanon during the civil war.