Waltz With Bashir: The fictions of the historical world

“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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS & ARTICLES

Aquinas, St. Thomas. (1965). Introduction to St Thomas Aquinas. McGraw-Hill Education: New York.

Baudrillard, Jean. (1988) ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ In Jean Baudrillard: Selected writings, ed. Mark Poster, 166-84. Standford University Press.

Baudrillard, Jean. (2006). ‘The precession of Simulacra.’ In Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, 453-481. MA Malden: Blackwell.

Crafton Donald (1982) Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Foucault, Michele (1998) ‘Interview’ 74-75. In Toby Miller. ‘Introduction: Daguerrotropes and Such’. Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Landesman, Ohad & Bendor, Roy (2011) Animated Recollections and Spectatorial Experience in Waltz with Bashir. Animation Vol 6, No. 3: 353-370

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1995). Tristes Tropiques. Pinguin Books. London. Pp. 425. ISBN: 978-0-141-19754-8

Maurice, Merleau-Ponty. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge: London (Original work published in 1945)

Nichols, Bill. (1994) ‘Performing Documentary’. In Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pages 92-106.

Nichols, Bill. (2010) Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies. Norton & Company Ltd. New York. Pp. 545. ISBN: 978-0-393-93491-5

Phillips, John. (2005) Masochism, fetishism and the contrasting gaze: female perversions. In Catherine Breillat’s Romance. In Screen Methods: comparative, eadings in film studies: 63-71. London & New York: Wallflower.

Strøm, Gunnar (2003) The animated documentary. Animation Journal 11: 46-63.

Wells, Paul. (1997) The beautiful village and the true village: A consideration of animation and the documentary aesthetics. In: Wells P. Art and Animation. London: Academy Editions, 40-45

Williams, Linda. (1998) ‘Mirrorrs without Memories’. Finn Caryl, ‘Containing Fire’. In Grant, Barry Keith et al., Documenting the Documentary. Wayne State University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London & New York: Verso

FILMS

Folman, Ari. (2008) Waltz with Bashir. Israel: Razor Film Produktion.

Fiennes, Sophie. (2006). The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. United Kingdom: Satellite Q&A