“I am fully aware that I have never
written anything other than fictions. For all that, I would not want to say
that they are outside truth. It seems possible to me to make fiction work
within truth, to induce truth effects within a fictional discourse, and in some
way make the discourse of truth arouse, ‘fabricate’ something which does not as
yet exist, thus ‘fiction’ something. One ‘fictions’ history starting from a
political reality that renders it true, one ‘fiction’ a politics that doesn’t
as yet exist starting from an historical truth”
Michele Foucault, Interview (1998).
John Grierson’s early definition of
documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ (2010:6) has remained up
to now as a useful framework to analyse documentary film. As Bill Nichols suggests,
documentaries ‘address the historical world itself rather than construct an
imaginary or fictional one’ (2010:99). Such framework lays a valuable base from
where to structure documentaries within film studies, and offers attractive
thoughts to interpret and debate to what extend documentaries refer to a
historical world rather than an imaginary one. In this regard, Ari Folman’s
animated film Waltz with Bashir (2008)
emerges as an illustrative case study to address such oppositions, and it does
it in both the animated form from where the documentary is structured and its
narrative involving the search to reveal a hidden past.
This essay attempts to illustrate how Waltz with Bashir offers a rich
perspective to look at the historical world. By framing the documentary into Bill
Nichol’s performative mode and describing the functions of it animated nature,
this research pretends to see the ways in which the film offers a valuable
theoretical insights to discuss with, something that a conventional documentary
may find more difficult to do. From a postmodern outlook, the essay will
attempt to show the relativeness of the concept of the real, discussing
simultaneously the extensions of such critique in relation to Waltz with Bashir. Secondly, through a
visual analysis of the film a psychoanalytical incursion will be offered to
unwrap Folman’s story and discuss our passive position as cinema viewers. The
bundle of oppositions depicted throughout the film and the memory conflict of
its characters will be analysed in order to strength the need to reinterpret
Grierson’ definition of documentary and deconstruct the idea of fiction as
opposed to reality.
Out of the six modes presented by Nichols to
categorize the organization of a given documentary film -expository, poetic,
observational, participatory, reflexive and performative- it is likely to
glimpse Waltz with Bashir in the
performative mode. In Nichols words, this particular set of conventions ‘stresses
emotional involvement with what it is like to witness a particular kind of
experience’ (2010: 124). Ari Folman’s journey in reconstructing a traumatic
past offers a personal response to the Sabra and Shatia massacre during the
1982 Lebanon war. Memory is here stressed over history, and so engagement
relies in the film more on conveying emotions rather than displaying mere
historical facts.
Nichols’ performative mode serves us to
contextualize Waltz with Bashir in a
more specific filmmaking tradition, in which the world consists of more than
facts and information. This guideline is also in line with the postmodern claim
of reality as simulacrum (Baudrillard, 2006), a fragmented and decentred world where
truth is no longer assured and the illusion of the objective observer is
revealed. Consequently, performative documentaries by stressing the filmmaker
experience and evoking a personal voice emerge as an alternative to the contingency
of reality. The strategy is designed to stress
the director’s point of view from a hall of mirrors; a vast horizon of relative
truth (Baudrillard,1988). In this direction, Folman’s performative documentary
shares the rejection to notions of objectivity underpinned by Wells, in what he
has categorized as the postmodern mode, one that questions the possibilities of
knowledge itself (1997). In the light of this debate, performative documentary
such as Folman’s emerges as a contemporary exponent highlighting the idea that
observational realism is an unrealisable fantasy, and so ‘documentary will
forever be circumscribed by the fact that it is a mode of representation and
thus can never elide the distance between image and event’ (1994: 180). However,
the animated condition of Waltz with Bashir
urges us to look for a more delimitated definition within the performative
framework. It particular style offers simultaneously further extensions toward
a postmodern deconstruction of reality; it replaces the indexical image as a
correspondence of reality by the animated representation of historical events. It
is therefore require to examine what is the animation doing in a documentary
than the camera or footage could not.
As Roe suggests in her article Absence, Excess and Epistemological
Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of Animated Documentary (2011)
it is necessary to underline the functions of animation to comprehend how it is
used in different types of documentaries, and what is more important here; for
what purpose. Roe offers three key ways in which animation operates; mimetic
substitution, non mimetic substitution and evocation. In the first two cases,
substitution works as an alternative to unavailable footage and general
difficulties to record live-action material. Whereas mimetic substitution attempts
to imitate the look of reality, non-mimetic substitution embraces animation as
a medium that ‘has the potential to express meaning through its aesthetic
realization’. (2011:226) The last function that of evocation responds to a
different nature which is to trace more invisible aspects of life in the form
of ideas, feelings and sensibilities. As Roe argues, ‘certain concepts,
emotions, feelings and states of mind are particularly difficult to represent
through live-action imagery’. (2011: 227) Thus, animation emerges as a creative
response to visualize these internal worlds.
In the film, it is likely to see animation
operating in the three ways described by Roe but in a dissimilar degree. First,
as a war memoir animation attempts to mimic certain places and events occurred in
the Lebanon’s war of 1982, as we see throughout the incursion of Israeli
soldiers into Lebanon territory. Secondly, as a traumatic experience
substitution is intensified to explore a forgotten past in which suppressed
memories lack of indexical imaginary. Animation responds here to fill the gap
of those unseeable aspects of reality in the form of dreams, hallucinations and
the unconscious. In
both cases mimetic and non-mimetic, substitution can be read as a creative
solution to replace the absence of filmed material as well as a medium that
expresses meaning through its aesthetic realization. Yet, it is in the evocation function where in Waltz with Bashir animation demonstrates
the medium’s capacity to express a personal insight through stylistic responses.
As argued by Landesman and Bendor (2011) the animated manner of interrogating
reality that Folman develops in the film is skilfully employ to disclosure a
disturbing reality ‘in all its complexity, ambiguity and multifacetedness’
(2011: 354). Animation here stands as a creative solution to show what
otherwise would have been hard to represent.
Having said that, it is now possible to
question some theoretical attempts to move animated documentaries a step
forward by positioning Walt with Bashir as a postmodern critique of photographic
realism. Hence, discussion on the extension of the postmodern function in
Folman’s documentary must be given.
In his article Waltz with Bashir and the postmodern function of animated documentary,
Peaslee (2011) suggests that photographic image, traditionally seen as bearing
a strict correspondence to what it represents, cannot be said to have an
indexical relationship to its referent any longer. The image emerging from the
photographic lens does not embody –in documentaries for example- aspects of the
historical world with great accuracy, but only partially and subjectively. ‘How
do I know?’ A phrase repeated throughout the film echoes Peaslee assumption,
suggesting that this content also calls attention to the film’s animated form:
‘How do I know about the things that I see? How does the medium allow me to
know the message?’ (2011: 231). In the light of this claim, as Linda Williams
suggests the camera can lie (1998), which again holds on the idea developed
earlier of truth as fragmented, relative and contingent. This crisis of
representation has also been unpacked by Peaslee in relation to the film.
However, unlike him I see the function of animation in Waltz with Bashir
functional to the narrative conflict of its characters and not as a deliberated
critique to the technical tyranny of the photographic camera lens. Peaslee
exemplified his claim analysing two consecutives scenes in the film. The first
one, when Folman looking for witnesses who might remember serving with him in
the war, asks Ronny if he recognizes him in a photo taken at the time of the
incursion. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t recognize myself either,’ Folman replies.
Then, in a second moment when we see Ronny’s own memory, he and his comrades
pose for a picture atop a tank, and just before the timer goes off and the
picture snaps, it falls from its perch on the gun barrel. Peaslee suggests that
these two events, ‘taken together, further suggest an argument concerning the
inability of the photographic image to capture the true nature of the story
Folman wants to tell’ (2011: 231). Contrasting Peaslee, I suggest that the
allegorical message of those scenes evokes meaningful insights in Folman’s
awakeness, and not a photographic image critique. He is now starting to put
isolated pieces together, and by collecting testimonies, Folman has embarked on
his journey to unmask his own hidden past. That is precisely why the camera
falls before the picture snaps; his memory still fragmented and thus Folman is
not able to complete the picture or recognized himself in it, because his own
truth has not been yet acquired. The appearance
of the photographic camera at the end of the film supports this argument. The
shift to the live action footage of the massacre is a rude act of awakening in
Folman’s quest, and so, it is also a more accurate picture in presenting the
recovery of his memory and achievement of his hidden truth. Then, what
animation does here is not to show us the inability of the photographic image
to capture the true; on the contrary it might suggest precisely that the film
image bears a more precise resemblance to its reference.
However, what previously said does not attempt
to give any credits or recognition to the realness of the camera image, but to
delimitate the functions of animation -substitutions and evocation- displayed
here. In this line, I see Folman’s
interrogation of reality through animation not only as fresh stylistic
decision, but also as another interesting thematic contradiction such as
documentary and animation. As it might be inferred already, in Folman’s film opposites
attract in meaningful ways. The tensions between dream and reality, past and
present, hallucinations and recollections, sanity and psychosis are efficiently
represented in this animation. It not only shows what is otherwise difficult to
represent; it offers simultaneously an ingenious bridge to interpret some
concepts developed by Folman from a theoretical, stylistic and narrative
approach.
Waltz
with Bashir opens with a group of 26 enraged dogs running in the nocturnal
streets of Tel Aviv in search of Boaz, one of Ari Folman’s friends. Only later
we realize that the scene is actually a nightmare experienced by him. The point
of origin from where the film starts is therefore regressive. ‘The dream is
coming from somewhere’ Boaz says, and few minutes later, when Folman asks Boaz
whether he has tried any therapy to deal with the nightmares, we realize that
he has only called Ari Folman, his filmmaker’s friend. ‘Can’t films be
therapeutic?’ Boaz wonders.
Such an opening produces a rich space for
theoretical incursion. Jean-Louis Baudry has defined cinema as ‘an artificial state
of regression’ (In Phillips, 2005: 177) an experience produced in the audience
by the moving images projected onto the screen, the darkness of the
surroundings and the spectator’s passive position. Such parallels between film
viewing and dreaming are strengthen in Waltz
with Bashir in many ways. Its own animated nature possesses a metaphoric
quality that boosts the spectator’s unconscious state. Its synth-based classical
music, somehow dark and dense, also transports the audience into the regressive.
Finally, the documentary’s own narrative is filled with flashbacks,
hallucinations and dreams; a story sketched to depict the unconscious in a
creative manner. All suggest that further parallels with psychoanalytical theory
could be drawn.
Let’s start with Bertrand Lewin’s definition
of the dream screen, a relevant psychoanalytic application that could be of
help to look at our spectator position while watching Waltz with Bashir. As explained in Phillips (2005): ‘all dreamers,
whether aware of it or not, project their dream upon a blank screen, a dream
screen, that represents the maternal breast, the first site of falling asleep
into dream.’ (2005: 178). Cinema as such is already similar to our unconscious;
it is a screen that feeds and plays with the desires of our passive body.
Nevertheless, it keeps desire at a safe distance; we are always outside the
screen. Such experience as viewers in relation to the screen/breast can also be
tracked throughout the film’s characters.
In the next interview, after visiting the
psychologist friend who helps Folman to be aware of the dynamics of reality and
fantasy that gird his memory, we see in flashbacks Carmi’s escape from
seasickness into a surreal vision of a giant naked woman ‘on whose breast,
maternal and erotic at once, he floats off while the rest of the crew is
bombed’ (Stewart: 2010). Later in the film, when Folman interviews another
fellow veteran friend, we watch Ronny’s memories on the occupation of Beirut. At
the moment of the explosion we see 5 Israeli soldiers running desperately towards
the shore; the atmospheric music here is tense. The only survivor is Ronny who
hid himself behind a rock until dark, moment when he decides to crawl out to
the sea. There, in the water ‘I felt safe’ he says. Few minutes earlier, Ronny
remembers his mother and a new flashback transports us to his childhood. Music
turns into passive and we witness a warm maternal hug.
The examples above illustrate the return to
the mother as a constant idea displayed in this documentary. The allegory
evoking the mother breast emerges as the site of falling asleep into dream, and
the same passivity is found in our position as spectators sitting still in a
darkened room before a screen. Another source to strength this point are the
sea scenes frequently exhibit to depict Folman’s fragmented memories of the war.
Water can be read here as an allegory to the amniotic fluid filling the fetus,
the mother’s liquid receptacle for the embryo. In this direction, the recurrent
languid swimming flashback of Folman ‘in the pre-dawn, flare-lit sea is a
defensive fiction [and] as anesthetizing as it looks’ (Stewart: 58).
The swimming flashbacks signals Folman’s
anaesthetising memory state, an embryo stage from where he intends to awake.
The quest to recover his memory and complete the picture is functional to the need
of shifting from the liquid world to the terrestrial domain, and both indicate
the move from the unconscious to a conscious state. When Folman consults the post
trauma expert Sahava Solomon, she recalls the story of a young amateur
photographer, who being a soldier in the war looked at everything as if through
an ‘imaginary camera’. The shooting, wounded people and screaming were
fictionalized by the soldier until his camera broke. After that, the situation
turned traumatic: ‘He had used a mechanism to remain outside events as if
watching the war on film instead of participating. This protected him [but]
once pulled into the events he could no longer deny reality’ explains the
therapist. The same question could be drag into the film. Does the camera
break? If so, when and how does it happen?
One could argue that here animation works as a
self defence mechanism to suppress traumatic experiences such as horror events
of the war, just like the young photographer ‘imaginary camera’. In consequence,
animation would be the fiction and the last scene footage the real. Still tempting
to affirm so, I believe that a deeper decodification is needed in this regard.
Let’s analyse this crossroad from two perspectives: Žižek’s
psychoanalytics and the memory maze described by Ari Folman’s friend Ori Silvan.
Slavoj Žižek (1989), employing Lacan’s registers
of the symbolic and the Real brings a fresh psychoanalytical approach to look
at in this case. For him, reality may be well decomposed in Lacan’s two
different orders. On the one hand we have the symbolic, connected to our
language and meanings, which constitutes the social context required to
interact with others and therefore to be properly installed in the
phenomenological lifeworld (Merleau-Ponty,
1962). On the other, there is the Real, connected to our dreams and the
unconscious; is what it is excluded from the symbolic and cannot be symbolized.
The Real therefore is the margin of what is without meaning; dreams are the
subject’s leftovers. Under this line, we can see how the symbolic order
represents our space of fantasy, in the sense that it covers certain
inconsistencies of our inner self offering a proper dwelling with this world. As
Lacan once said, ‘fantasy is the support that gives
consistency to what we call reality’ (In Žižek, 1989: 44). If the fantasy is taken away from
this order that of which concede meaning –in Žižek words, the symbolic fictions- then
reality lose itself. Such fantasy is what masks the Real found in dreams. In
dreams there is nothing holding us but our repressed desires. That is to say if
something gets too violent, then it shatters the coordinates of our reality and
we have to repress it. That is exactly what happens in the film: Folman’s
reality gets too traumatic and hence has to be erased from the symbolic order. Therefore,
the illusion is installed in the symbolic, in the fantasy holding him from his
Real desires. It is therefore in dreams that he comes closer to the real
awakening, a painful experience that we all have to face in order to get rid of
our fantasies. As Žižek explains, ‘In
order to attack the enemy, you first have to beat the rubbish out of yourself;
you need to face your
nightmares’ (In Fiennes, 2006).
Under this outlook, animation does not longer represent
an imagined or fictionalized world in Folman’s quest. On the contrary, it
stands as the Real of Folman’s desires found in his unconscious. Thus, confronting
such dreams might be the only way to break his imaginary camera. Let’s take
another example.
Ari Folman’s friend, Ori Silvan shows through
a psychological experiment how memory works. He says that ‘even if some details
are missing, these black holes are filled by our memory until there is a fuller
remembrance of something that never happened’. I other words, memory is dynamic
and it can fabricate experiences that never occurred. In their article Animated Recollections and Spectatorial
Experience in Waltz with Bashir, Landesman and Bendor (2011) deal with such
issue. Their concept of mnemic contexture
is here developed to address memory from both the real and the imagined, since
it embraces experiences that took place in reality and also experiences that
never happened. Thus, ‘together, the real and the imagined, the actual and the
fantastic, construct the fabric of memory’ (2011: 355). That is to say; both
forms of reality are inseparable from our experience of the world. This is what
phenomenology refers to as the lifeworld;
‘the background structure that allows entities, relations and identities to
become meaningful’ (2011:355). Memory presented as such is a complex mixture of
opposed images and remind us once again that opposites can attract in
meaningful ways. The same suggestion has been developed by the anthropologist
Levi Strauss throughout his work. For him oppositions are not presented as
elements from a different structure but as two sides from the same coin; just like
the actual and the fantastic or the animation and the photographic camera
discussed above:
‘For scientist, dawn and twilight are
one and the same phenomenon and the Greeks thought likewise, since they had a
single word with a different qualifying adjective according to whether they
were referring to morning or evening (...) But in fact no two phenomena could
be more different from each other that night and morning.’ (1995; 62)
If memory can fabricate experiences, in the
context of the film it is not feasible to determine any longer that animation
evokes the fictionalized world and the live-action scene the real. The ending
suggests that the black holes have been filled and consciousness recovered.
Yet, sill Folman’s conscious, his own mnemic
contexture, a mirror out of many from the hall.
Going back from where we started it is how I
intend to end this essay; that of Grierson’s early definition of documentary as
‘the creative treatment of actuality’. As it has been stressed here, the very
idea of truth and the real has come to a stage of interrogation where we can no
longer determine its origin: all can be simultaneously true and real, but also
imagined or simulated. In such domain, Folman treats in a creative manner his
past experiences of the war; a historical fact narrated with a personal stamp,
a representation of the world out of many. But, if there is no more origin or
essence, what is actuality? How can documentary still be understood as the
treatment of actuality?
Far from suggesting a new definition to frame
documentaries as an autonomous field within film studies, I propose to interpret
the concept of actuality as contingency. The idea of contingency as defined by
St. Thomas Aquinas refers to that which is neither necessarily nor impossible, hence,
pointing the unpredictability of human behaviour (1965). There, everything that
it is can be different to how it occurs to be. Therefore, actuality understood
under this lens becomes a blank fan of possibilities where everything can be
otherwise as it is. That is how such historical world turns into a world of
representations and Ari Folman’s search to reveal his hidden and traumatic past
stands as an illustrative example to see the many possibilities and ingenuous
manner in which documentaries can treat creatively the contingency of the historical
world.
Waltz
with Bashir has shown us here how much animation has to offer: a wide
variety of resources to play with. As viewers, animation leaded us to places
that the lens of the camera might find more difficult to represent -must be
difficult to depict someone lying on a giant naked woman in the middle of the
ocean-. As directors, it offers many possibilities to create metaphors and
meaningful acts of associations that help to stress our own filmmaking
experience, thus to evoke more freely a personal voice. It not only enriches
the performative mode described by Nichols but it also works here as a canny
solution to Folman’s story of post-traumatic disorder and memory lost. At last,
as film researchers animation allows us to dialogue with a wide variety of
theories in a creative way due to its own resourcefulness. However, such
possibilities can also be misleading, enough reason to set a framework from
where to observe. As such, this essay has intended to analyse Folman’s Waltz with Bashir from a visual and a
theoretical outlook, an endeavour that has been facilitated by the skeleton composed
out of Nichol’s performative mode and Roe’s functions of animation.
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