You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Ari Folman, writer, director, and “actor” in his animated tour de force Waltz with Bashir, has created a profoundly moral tale, an in-depth examination of trauma, memory, and guilt. A compelling memoir, it documents the 1982 war in Lebanon, the Shatila and Sabra refugee camp massacres by Lebanese Christian Phalangists, and the impact of the horror of war and the slaughter of civilians on Israeli soldiers, many of them teenagers at the time, who witnessed the massacre and were helpless to stop it.
The film begins with an iconic rendering of the “hounds of war,” a dream image described by Yoni Goodman, a friend of Folman's, twenty years after they served as infantrymen in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1982 war. Snarling, fiery-eyed raging dogs race down a city street at dawn, seemingly straight at the viewer. The sky is a lurid yellow, the surrounding buildings and streets a grim grey-blue. The image may recall the line “Cry havoc, and unleash the hounds of war” from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Turbulent yet melancholy music (by electronic musician and the film's composer, Max Richter), accompanies the image. The viewer witnesses the traumatizing effects of war through the effects it has on those who will forever bear its scars and feel its terror. And their guilt.
The film is structured by Folman's discovery of his dissociation and repression, his own amnesiac response to the experience, triggered by a nightmare that his friend relates, and which leads Folman to contact other men who served with him to learn of their memories and of what has disturbed him even beyond trauma.
The “even beyond trauma” was guilt, which suggests that the film is a form of atonement, a burning desire to expose the truth, to awaken others to the horrors and ravages of war, and to engender compassion and concern in place of disavowal and denial. The realization of how he deployed defenses leads him to challenge others to face their own defenses against memories and the truth. In a compell