Animating the Lebanon War

"Waltz with Bashir", an animated Israeli documentary about the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, begins with a dream that has been haunting the narrator, a middle-aged Israeli veteran of that war. He and a couple comrades are swimming naked at night just off the Beirut shoreline, wearing nothing but dog tags and rifles. Then, rocket flares light up the sky and the apartment buildings along the Corniche. Some awful thing is drawing them up out of the dark water, summoning them to West Beirut.

"Waltz with Bashir" opened yesterday at the New York Film Festival, and those of you who live in the Tri-State area should try to see it. The documentary recounts the attempt by the narrator (director Ari Foleman) to find the meaning of that dream, and piece together his repressed memories of what happened during the Lebanon War, which to a generation of Israelis was something like what Vietnam was to Americans: a morally ambiguous conflict, a humiliating defeat, and an episode that the rest of their country tried to forget.

The movie -- if that's what I should call it -- is also a stunning example of the power of animation as a historical and narrative tool. Not only could an Israeli documentary film team never have gone to Lebanon, but even an international film crew with a massive budget would have struggled to covey both the visual authenticity of Lebanon in the 1980's -- bombed out cityscapes and period sets -- and the psychological surreality war. But with animation, Foleman can cross national, historical, and psychological borders. On the one hand he can re-enact the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in all its primal horror. On the other hand he can depict the hallucinations of soldiers overwhelmed by the force of events, such as when a seasick Israeli thinks he's being shipped to Lebanon on the bosom of a beautiful woman.

When I saw the movie in Jerusalem this summer, I couldn't help wondering how viewers in Lebanon would react if they ever had a chance of seeing it -- perhaps on black market DVDs, since showing Israeli films is illegal here. I think most people would find it surprising. It's very easy, from the chaotic Arab side of this hostile border, to read too much deliberation and intent into Israeli history. They seem so powerful and unified when compared to Arab society. But the characters of "Waltz with Bashir" are pawns of fate, the children of Holocaust survivors tempest-tossed from Europe, who are thrown unprepared into this new conflict, where they kill and are killed pretty much at random.

Still, that might not necessarily win the hearts and minds of Lebanese and Palestinians, who might regard it as a feature-length exercise in self-absolution. "Waltz with Bashir" doesn't take responsibility for the Lebanon War and the atrocities that followed. But sifting through his own traumatic memories, Folman makes a backhanded acknowledgment that he and his friends were witnesses of traumas comparable and inextricably linked to their own. And that's more than most people in the Middle East – indeed, most of us anywhere -- are willing to do.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut