Waltz with Bashir
Written and directed by Ari Folman. With Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Ari Folman, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Lazarov, Mickey Leon, and Ori Sivan. (R)
As I write this, the Academy Awards telecast is burbling along in the background, and WALL"E has just brought home an Oscar for the Pixar studio. It's a good win for a good film, but I can't help but feel that Waltz with Bashir is being slighted. This animated Israeli film is a marvel, both visually and in the haunting journey of its story, and it deserves more exposure. Perhaps it was excluded for arcane reasons known only to those versed in Academy bylaws—I can't bear to dig that deep—and it is, of course, still up for the Best Foreign Film award. But even if it wins, it's hard to shake the depressing idea that an animation nomination alone might have meant more than a win in the foreign column. (Update: It lost to Japan's entry, Departures, a film even less likely to be seen.)
The film centers on writer/director Ari Folman's memory of his involvement in the infamous massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the Lebanon War in 1982. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it is the story of his search for memory; Folman is haunted by a single, hallucinatory image from that time, having blocked out most of what happened. To uncover the truth and the depth of his involvement, he seeks out his former comrades, probing their memories and unearthing some unpleasant bits of history.
As his old friends tell their stories, Folman begins to recover bits and pieces of his own memory, but the film is less about his particular story than the terrible effect of war—on its victims and its soldiers, most of them here no more than young men. Rolling into Lebanon aboard armored tanks, IDF soldiers sing songs as if they're on a road trip; seconds later, a sniper's bullet tears into someone's throat. Another soldier, separated from his unit, crawls into the dark Mediterranean for a desperate swim back toward Israel, leaving the beach strewn with the bodies of his friends.
Theirs was a strange, undisciplined war—Israel was barely three decades old—and Folman and his fellow IDF men seem to be winging it, making up the rules of engagement on the spot in response to a given threat. In the sequence that gives the film its title, a slightly off-kilter soldier named Frenkel seizes a machine gun and seems to literally dance his away across a Beirut intersection, firing wildly at snipers as he dodges their bullets. All around him, posters of the slain Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel flutter in his wake, a reminder of what's to come: the Christian Phalangists who supported Bashir will take a bloody revenge in the camps.
Folman wisely doesn't try to excuse his part in the war. The son of Auschwitz survivors, he makes some fairly overt connections between his story and his parents' war years—people loaded onto trucks, talk of a "purge," and an eerie similarity between the refugee camps and his parents' Warsaw ghetto.
Wisely too, he ends his film with archival footage from the camps, with bodies cut and bloated and piled over one another or left under trucks. As impressive and effective as the animation is—and it is simply stunning, as beautiful, clear, and evocative as a Japanese woodcut—it would be too easy for his detractors to say he's made a cartoon tragedy. By including his real-life footage, he ensures that no one who sees his film will forget the true cost of war, for both its victims and survivors.
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Also this week: Another film about conflict in the Middle East comes to Northampton this Friday night as part of a film series sponsored by the Northampton Committee to Stop the War in Iraq. Screening at 7 p.m. at the Media Education Foundation, Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is a documentary film produced by the Media Education Foundation, an organization dedicated to inspiring "critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media."
Through interviews with peace activists, authorities on Middle East politics and media critics, the film aims to provide a corrective to what the filmmakers see as a bias in U.S. media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. By comparing the stateside coverage with international reporting, directors Sut Jhally (also the founder of MEF) and Bathsheba Ratzkoff hope to show that America's dependence on foreign oil and need for a strong military presence in the region have compromised the ethical standards of our nation's journalism, and let Israel wield an undue influence over how news from the area is reported.
Writing in the New York Times—a paper no doubt viewed with suspicion by many of the film's fans—Ned Martel calls the film "relentless," a "one-sided account" that nevertheless "brings some lesser-known offenses to light and advances a scenario that is bold and detailed." And while some parts of the film seem to be part and parcel of critical documentaries today—is there any film of the kind that doesn't feature the talking head of Noam Chomsky?—some of the film's complaints are less familiar, yet still carry the jarring punch of truth-telling. For instance, it notes that Americans are often given the life story of a fallen Israeli soldier—but how often are those who fall on the other side even given a name?
A less politically charged film festival comes to Hampshire College's Franklin Patterson Hall this Saturday night. Mountainfilm on Tour is a traveling selection of films from the Telluride Film Festival that focus on themes of adventure, mountaineering, and the environment. The three-hour program features a mix of short segments and longer works.
Pickin' & Trimmin' is a short but endearing film about The Barbershop, a small business and de facto community center in Drexel, N.C. Past the barber chairs in the front of the building is a door labeled The Back Room; walking through it is like entering another time. On the other side of the wall, locals get together to pick guitars, mandolins, and more with the sort of small-town bonhomie that much of America has left by the side of the superhighway. With the shop—like so many businesses in town—threatened by tight finances, could music prove to be a way to keep the doors open?
Spray: Window of Opportunity is a short film that follows rock climber Chris Lindner as he explores the craggy coast of northern California. A lifelong mountaineer, Lindner finds an uncommon peace clinging to cliff faces as the Pacific detonates against the rocks beneath his feet. When he finds his dream cliff—an impossibly steep bit of rock that hangs out over the ocean— the cameras follow him on his most challenging and most meaningful climb.
Red Gold is just long enough—and this is probably no accident—to be a PBS special. Combining a few of the favorite topics of the public broadcast set (the environment, wildlife and food), filmmakers Ben Knight and Travis Rummel hit all the right buttons. The film's title refers to sockeye salmon, whose presence provides a livelihood for the people of Bristol Bay, Alaska, where the planet's two largest remaining sockeye runs course through the Kvichak and Nushagak Rivers. Threatening this traditional way of life are two mining companies whose proposal to dig for gold and copper in the region may be worth as much as $600 billion. Over the course of two months, Knight and Rummel document the rising ill will between the native fishermen and the mine officials who try to downplay their fears.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
