History Lesson

The National Society of Film Critics picks their “best of” in early January, after the major critics’ groups and media outlets have announced their picks. It’s always intriguing to see what they choose. They make their choices in obvious reaction to the choices other groups make, and they often champion something that has been overlooked, like a foreign film or an indie production that hasn’t a chance of getting attention on a grander scale. Sometimes they just seem utterly contrary, but they tend to value risk and daring more than other groups. They’ve picked movies like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive; Goodfellas and The Pianist and Pan’s Labyrinth. This year they picked Waltz with Bashir, which has finally opened in Buffalo this weekend.
It feels like a groundbreaking picture: an animated documentary about one man’s experiences and faulty memories related to the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps on the west side of Beirut. The filmmaker, Ari Folman, had a memory block about his experiences of events of that autumn, and interviewed various men who were part of his regiment or fought elsewhere in Lebanon that September. Gradually a clearer but not entirely full picture of the massacre—and Folman’s memories—emerges. He goes so far as to cut to actual footage shot for a few minutes at the very end of the film. His decision to do this feels very personal, and at the very least a kind of unequivocal demonstration that whatever the flaws of memory or recreated memory, the horrors of those three days were undeniably real, actual. The power of what comes beforehand is so substantial that it makes you question whether Folman’s decision was the right choice or not.
I've become a big fan of animated films in recent years, which still sort of surprises me. A friend of mine credits (blames?) this on my generation, but I think it's because animated films are being made with great care and affection. Waltz with Bashir is no exception. The quality of the animation is similar to that in those commercials for Charles Schwab (Richard Linklater used the same technique in Waking Life), but it’s less fluid, more stop-motion. The colors are bilious—-sickly yellows, grays, and greens—-and the camera work during the combat scenes feels like the latest Nintendo game, which is disturbing and interesting at the same time. In fact, during the scenes of the most abject wartime horror, the movie has the same hallucinatory, magical, even spiritual power of the dreamtime sequences in the movies of Hayao Miyazaki. So I’m arguing with myself a little about those last few minutes. I am thinking that because we’ve become so accustomed to the presence of digital film in this age of the Blackberry and other handheld devices, we’ve seen more and more of the kind of footage that Folman clips onto the end of his movie. The tension between the distancing effects of animation and the urgency of Folman’s quest strikes me as one source, maybe even the source, of the film’s power. It’s like coming across the comic book version of the 9/11 Commission report—you know what the images from that day looked like, but you get to see it, and experience it, in a new way through graphics.
In any case, it’s a remarkable film.