Memory, Trauma and Ethics in Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies ISSN: 1472-5886 (Print) 1472-5894 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmjs20 WAR FANTASIES: MEMORY, TRAUMA AND ETHICS IN ARI FOLMAN'S WALTZ WITH BASHIR Raz Yosef To cite this article: Raz Yosef (2010) WAR FANTASIES: MEMORY, TRAUMA AND ETHICS IN ARI FOLMAN'S WALTZWITHBASHIR , Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 9:3, 311-326, DOI: 10.1080/14725886.2010.518444 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2010.518444 Published online: 10 Dec 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 3175 View related articles Citing articles: 8 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cmjs20 Raz Yosef WAR FANTASIES: MEMORY, TRAUMA AND ETHICS IN ARI FOLMAN’S WALTZ WITH BASHIR This paper explores the relationship between memory, trauma and ethics in the Israeli war film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008). I argue that Waltz with Bashir highlights a traumatic rupture between history and memory, and points to the decline of national collective memory in Israel. In the film, the war is represented as the private memory of a dis- tinct social group—soldiers who fought in the First Lebanon War—and is no longer a collective memory, a lived and practised tradition that conditions Israeli society. The film is constructed as a kind of lieu de me´moire that houses repressed traumatic events that have been denied entry into the nation’s historical narrative, and which the protagonists feel duty bound to remember. This detachment from the national collective memory draws the film into a timeless world of dreams, hallucinations and fantasies. The film does not aspire to reveal the true details of the war. Rather, it is concerned with memory and the very process of remembering, as well as with the ethical questions that they pose to both the film’s protagonists and its viewers. These questions are reflected both in the film’s narrative and in its unique aesthetics. Reviewing the past Ari Folman’s 2008 Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir (Vals im Bashir)—which won the 2009 Golden Globe Award and was a nominee for the Academy Award in the category of Best Foreign Language Film—describes the journey taken by the filmmaker, who is also the film’s main character, in pursuit of his lost memories of the First Lebanon War (1982). The film is a hallucinatory quest into the depths of director’s consciousness as he tries to reconstruct three days the war that have been entirely erased from his memory. Specifi- cally, Folman attempts to locate his repressed traumatic memory of the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The film is an animated documentary— an animation based on documentary video footage—comprised of conversations that Folman conducted with friends and journalists who took part in the war, as well as with psychologists who specialize in post-traumatic stress disorder and who tried to help the filmmaker reconstruct those missing days from his distant past. The First Lebanon War left painful scars on the Israeli national memory and was the longest and most controversial of all Israel’s wars. It began in 1982 with what was meant to be a short two- or three-month operation—euphemistically called “Operation Peace for Galilee” (Mivtza shalom hagalil)—with the objective of protecting Israel’s northern settlements from attack by Hezbollah. It ended three years later, in June 1985. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 9, No. 3 November 2010, pp. 311–326 ISSN 1472-5886 print/ISSN 1472-5894 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14725886.2010.518444 312 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES However, it was only after 18 years that the Israeli government declared a final withdrawal of all IDF forces from Lebanon. When the war began, it enjoyed wide public support, but this diminished as the extent of the battles, their true objective (bringing about a new political order in Lebanon and the Middle East), and the number of casual- ties came to light. It was a political war that weakened the Israeli right and led to Mena- chem Begin’s resignation as Prime Minister and his departure from the political scene. As the IDF became embroiled ever deeper in the problems of Lebanon’s internal politics, public opposition intensified, reaching its peak after the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The war would later be known as “a war of choice” and “the other war”.1 This is not the first time that the First Lebanon War has been represented on the Israeli screen. It has featured in a number of films, such as Ricochets (Shtei etzba`ot metzi- don, dir. Eli Cohen, 1982), Fragments (Resisim, dir. Yossi Zomer, 1989), Cup Final (Gemar gavia, dir. Eran Riklis, 1991), and The Cherry Season (Onat haduvdevanim, dir. Haim Buzaglo, 1991). Generally, these films were critical of the Zionist national narrative and the Israeli government’s belligerent policies, and aspired to offer a “leftist” political portrayal of the war that had exacted a heavy price from both sides of the Israeli–Pales- tinian conflict. However, some of them were ultimately subjugated to a pro-Israel “liberal-humanist” ideological perspective by which these films by-and-large described the Israeli soldier’s psychological deliberations and pangs of conscience. This soldier was represented as an “enlightened” occupier who “shoots and weeps”—sensitive to, and identifying with, the Palestinians’ suffering, and who feels and sees himself as persecuted. The film Ricochets, for example, purports to demonstrate the Israeli soldier’s moral supremacy. On the one hand, it sketches out an optimistic fantasy of the relationship between the Israeli soldier and Lebanon’s Shiite refugee population: Effi (Boaz Ofri), one of the soldiers, gives some chocolate to a Shiite woman, who gives him some cher- ries in return. On the other hand, the film also portrays the political situation as a dead end. In one scene, Georgie (Alon Aboytboul), the army cook, explains the complexities of the situation in Lebanon to Gadi (Roni Finkovitz), the new officer: The Christians hate the Druze and the Shiites—so do the Sunni and the Palestinians. The Druze hate the Christians, the Shiites and the Syrians ... The Sunni hate whoever their bosses tell them to hate, and not only do the Palestinians hate every- one else, they hate each other as well ...And they’ve all got one thing in common: they all hate—and you’ve no idea how much—us Israelis. This comic representation of Lebanon’s socio-political dynamics leads to the final con- clusion that Israel is the innocent victim of the Arabs’ irrational hatred.2 Other films such as Cup Final and The Cherry Season were more radical in their cri- tique of the First Lebanon War. As the Israeli film scholar Nurith Gertz argues, “just as Ricochets portrays the justice of the Israeli cause and Cup Final repudiates it, Cherry Season portrays Israeli justice as utterly irrelevant and the war as utterly perverse”.3 And yet, Israeli cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s represented the embarrassment and help- lessness of the Israeli left following its recognition of the existence of the Palestinian other than as the victim of Jewish-Israeli oppression. Rather than telling the Palestinian story, these films tried to ease the liberal conscience of their directors, who belonged to WAR FANTASIES 313 the Israeli peace camp, as well as that of the audiences who watched their films. Indeed, the failure of the war, and the traumatic events associated with it, were not fully addressed and mourned by Israeli cinema at that time. The film Waltz with Bashir, as well as other recent Israeli documentary and feature films such as Wasted (Mebuzbazim, dir. Nurit Kedar, 2006), Beaufort (Boufor, dir. Joseph Cedar, 2007) and Lebanon (Levanon, dir. Samuel Maoz, 2009) revisit the traumatic recol- lections of the First Lebanon War. These films mark one of the most interesting phenomena in contemporary Israeli cinema: films that explore repressed traumatic events from the First Lebanon War, events that have been denied entry into the shared national past.4 The documentary film Wasted presents the war memories of eleven soldiers who had served at the Beaufort outpost six months before the IDF’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000. The soldiers are haunted by the ghosts of the war: they remember the sights and sounds of battle and recall a war in which they did not ever see the enemy. At the centre of Wasted stands the trauma of the destroyed male body of the killed or wounded soldier. In one of the scenes, a soldier relates his personal memories of the war: When I’m treating their wounds, at some point I have to touch the wounds, expose them ...You’re covered in blood, and then you take out your bandage to bandage him up, you try to open it but it’s slippery from the blood, and you put it in your mouth to rip it, and you’ve got the taste of your friend’s blood in your mouth. In between the soldiers’ chilling confessions, in which they tell about the shocking images of the pounded and lacerated male body, the filmmaker, Nurit Kedar, inserts clips of potent men wearing khaki pants and tight black tank-tops over their well- toned muscles. These male bodies crash to the floor, twisting and writhing against the background of phosphorescent lighting—similar to military flares—and quiet and threatening music that simulates the hell of the battlefield.

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