Waltz With Bashir

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It’s happened to everyone. The missing piece of a memory, the lost event, slipping through our fingers of recall like something soft and granular and formless. Its shape is there, like a black hole in the brain, a jigsaw piece cut out with an exacto knife. And for most of us — especially those of us living in North American liberal democracies — it’s something banal. Car keys. The face of an old girlfriend. The song that was playing when you found out Kurt Vonnegut died. For Ari Folman, it was anything but.

In 2002, he realized that he couldn’t remember the Sabra and Shatila massacre that occurred 20 years prior while he was serving with the Israeli Defense Force, when he knows that he would have been less than 300 metres away from the camps where it was taking place. Folman’s Oscar-nominated film, Waltz With Bashir, is the chronicle of his search to discover what happened.

When making a documentary about an event you have no memory of (and of which there exists little to no archival footage), the production of filmable material becomes a problem. Folman’s solution is to animate the whole thing using a combination of Flash, cel animation and original 3-D drawings. While the animation allows Folman to reproduce grisly battle scenes and their often surreal aftermath with an uncanny kind of fidelity, it also serves as an important device in his patchwork narrative structure, providing a level of separation from the gruesome reality of his slowly returning memory. He suggests very early that he believes memory is far closer to imagination than historical document, and the film’s style is his demonstration of that thesis — it resembles Richard Linklater’s Waking Life in both esthetic and intent, but with more purpose and less pretence.

While Folman’s lens is (metaphorically) pointed at the battlefield, the animated presentation succeeds in creating a sense of reality that is at once truthful and completely unreal. When he depicts his conversations with his war buddies two decades later, though, the static inexpressiveness of the cartoon actors is sometimes unsettling for the wrong reasons. Towards the end of the film especially, when Folman begins relying more and more on talking head interviews, the long, awkward pauses created by the lack of real-world texture (ie: nervous ticks, eye movement) can verge on the unintentionally absurd. Still, there’s an unforgettable moment at the end of the film that arguably justifies Folman’s obstinate consistency. Whether it does or not — much like the truth Folman is able to roughly hew together from his memories — is left entirely to the audience.