Is there really no existing thread about this film? I would very much like others on the blog to watch this and give their reactions, not least because I am still processing my own reactions. The film is animated (until the end), and it follows the efforts of the director and writer, Ari Folman, to recover his own memories and those of his fellow Israeli soldiers, concerning the events surrounding the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in southern Lebanon in 1983.
The film begins with a wonderful dream sequence, recounted by a friend of Folman’s, which leads Folman to realize that he has no memories of his part in the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, twenty years before the film begins. Most of the film involves Folman meeting with old friends and comrades from the war — all depicted as animated characters — and piecing together the events. Occasionally he meets with friends who are also psychiatrists, and they explain some of the capacities of the mind to forget events following trauma, or to misremember those events.Thus the interview process involves recovering those memories accurately, and adding to Folman’s own experience by learning of the experiences of his fellow soldiers.
The film does three things very well indeed. First, the animation is superb, alternating between remarkable realism (dogs running in a pack, reflected in puddles and car mirrors) and the stark use of reds and yellows to capture moments of combat or impending doom. The battle sequences manage to convey the fear and disorientation of the soldiers. Second, the narrative device of the film — the filmmaker essentially interviewing other participants (Shoah-style) — is highly effective for exploring the theme of memory, its frailties and its tricks. Again and again we get an image fragment, and we don’t know if it is “true”, if it is partially true, or if it simply represents some part of the truth. The interviews match these image fragments against the memories of other participants.
Third, the film examines complicity to mass murder, and the question — usually asked of the killers of Jews, not Jews themselves — why did you not take personal responsibility for trying to stop the massacre? Near the end, the filmmaker asks several other participants what they saw, who they told, and why they did not try harder to get those in authority to intervene. Folman talks about a series of concentric circles of Israeli soldiers outside the Sabra and Chatila camps, each with some part of the necessary information, but none of them with enough to see the whole picture. And Folman does not shirk from the horror of those massacres. Right at the end, the animation shows a line of Palestinian women wailing at the loss of their husbands, brothers, children, and you see the horror on Folman’s animated face. then the animation stops and we see almost two minutes of actual news footage of those same Palestinian women, and the piles of bodies discovered when the Israeli army finally entered the camps.
It is a remarkable film, and I highly recommend it. But it does make a very conscious choice to ultimately forgive the rank-and-file Israeli soldiers, or at least to understand. This is not a film about the Palestinian victims; they are simply piles of corpses. This is a film about the psychological trauma suffered by the Israeli solders who — at the end of the day — enabled the massacres. That is what Folman knows, and so it is reasonable for him to choose to portray that perspective. But there is something disturbing about displacing concern from the Palestinians to the Israelis; for creating a film about the psychic costs of being a colonizer.
First, I’ll just nod vigorously to your comments about what works so well in the film–particularly its animation, its visual and narrative style producing a kind of vigorous dreamlike investigation. Like the promise of lucid dreaming: where what we see is highly-stylized, imbued with the exaggerated perspectives of desire and horror, yet focused on getting to the heart, to some truth, of what is depicted.
That said, I too found Folman’s investigation–while commendably self- (and nation-)critical–still largely self- (and nation-?)obsessed. Chris wrote
I would note that the Palestinians are given one other role beyond “piles of corpses”–they are the snipers, the unseen dangers in the highrises, along the road, at the beach. There is a (direct?) correlation between that sense of dangerous invisibility and the slaughter that followed, and the film fails to engage explicitly with that link. Such “failure” is perhaps an astute aesthetic judgment, a provocation that allows an audience (one imagines Israeli, or Western?) to feel complicit, to feel the fear and then be yet another of the concentric circles around the massacres that must face some measure of responsibility. (The startling shift from cartoon to film, then, and particularly the disappearance of Folman’s muted narrative voice questioning and thinking over the gruesome images, forces us perhaps into more engagement with the consequences?)
But I’m not sure it isn’t still a failing, or at least an absence not fully justified given the film’s intent — in a film where Folman interviews so many others, even academics and reporters, to get at both “the event” and how we remember, it began to bother me that the film never talked with any Palestinians or Phalangists or….? Just Israelis. Folman updates Marlow, recounting the darkness as he tries to recover the heart of what happened, but such self-critical interrogation seems still stuck in the blindered narratives of colonization.
But then again… there’s one moment where one psychologist interviewed notes that Folman may be struggling with the impact of two different genocides, as his parents survived Auschwitz — their stories/memories overwhelm or confusingly correlate with his own, particularly as he is forced (in trying to recall the events in Beirut) to end up identifying with Nazis. . . I get the sense from my own limited awareness of the internal debates in Israel that such a move–and perhaps the film’s other aesthetic and moral linkages, noted above–may be far more disruptive and challenging than it is to this smug American viewer, judging from afar.
I wanted to like this film, but I fear I too am a smug American viewer. It looked great, but I thought the central narrative conceit (“Why can’t I remember those years!?!”) to be a bit hoary. I thought the Marlow “update” to be stale. Interesting that this film did not win an Oscar.
I am thinking of using this film next semester in a oourse whose vague them is film and global relations, but I wonder if there are better films regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I also wonder about the self-flagellation here–why “smug?”
I think this would work very well in a course. Munich is another obvious possibility. There are lots of movies (esp. Bloody Sunday) if you want to deal with the Northern Ireland conflict.
I think this movie–and Munich–would work quite well. A film that is also very, very intriguing but also quite a bit tougher to unpack/digest is Elias Suleiman’s odd, funny Divine Intervention. (And you’re doing film, but Joe Sacco’s comic “Palestine” is excellent, and John Patrick Shanley’s strange sort-of-allegorical play “Dirty Story” is pretty interesting, too.)
I wasn’t really feeling smug, or bashing myself. Mostly just being quick and lazy. The charge of being sort of smug as an American, critiquing other countries’ approaches to conflict, seems to be a common response to criticisms like the ones we threw out. I disagree, but my comment seemed more like I bought that argument. Nope.
I would like, if possible, to find films from the Palestinian viewpoint–those that do not make terrorism the primary concern. Most likely I will use a bit of Sacco in the discussion. I am sometimes afraid of these “hot button” issues as people will fall back on positions that are impassioned, though ill-informed.
Suleiman’s a Palestinian filmmaker. And he’s making comedies. So you may find him useful for those objectives….
just saw this, and i find the critiques voiced by chris and mike somewhat misguided. in the current climate in israel, where many massacres similar to those perpetrated by christian phalangists (with the cooperation of the IDF) in ’82 have now been perpetrated by the israelis themselves over and over (the film must have been shot around the july 2006 horrific lebanon war). many a refugee camps have been bulldozed and many a palestinians have been killed. poignantly, the film came out just as the IDF was laying waste to gaza.
so this unflinching inward analysis at the horrors perpetrated by the israeli army in 1982 seems far from the self-indulgent chest-beating of the faux-remorseful colonizer. it seems to me more like a wholesale condemnation of a very live and far-from-unpopular fact of israeli foreign policy, i.e. the continuing genocide of the palestinian people.
that palestinians are not interviewed seemed respectful and not smug to me. it would have been smug if this deep introspective look, by an israeli director in hebrew and for an israeli audience, at personal and collective trauma had had some token palestinian voice thrown in. the palestinians can tell their own story. and they are, in any case, front and center here, since ari folman, as mike points out, draws clear analogies between the massacres of sabra and chatila and various massacres perpetrated during war world II — auschwitz, the warsaw ghetto. since the holocaust is regularly used as a blanket excuse for israeli aggression (more about this later), comparing the massacres of the palestinians to its massacres are fighting words for sure.
this is a fantastic movie about trauma and memory. in the extras folman says that he wanted to make a movie in which the figure soldier is most decidedly not glamorized, unlike, he says, in american movies, that, sure, condemn war, while at the same time exalting the american warrior. i had to think about david simon’s rather amazing Generation Kill, a less deep but still poignant gaze inside the american foolishness in iraq, but also a movie that does make the soldiers look cool. and this is what i thought: that the way in which we think of war here is very much marked by the fact that we (the white majority, that is) never had to suffer its horrors at home. so war is always only the experience of young boys, necessarily glorified at home because it would be scummy to send those kids over there and then make them look like losers. (many directors have come close to make our soldiers look like losers, but they are still, regardless, cool).
folman doesn’t have this problem. israelis have lived with war since day one and know that war sucks. their rapport with war is more culturally uniform. it’s not just the province of typically lower class or lower-middle class volunteers and their families, mostly coming from the great inland, away from the culture-producing hubs of the coasts.
back to trauma and memory, it seems great to me that folman recognizes the inextricable intersection of personal and collective memory/trauma. as he searches and (re?)constructs his memory in order to give room to his trauma, he 1. helps other soldiers come to terms with their own traumatic memories, and 2. makes a documentary that forces its israeli and jewish audience to come to terms with its own war trauma.
since israeli addiction to war stems directly from WWII, it seems essential that folman should have brought WWII up. WWII and the holocaust act not only as justification for israel’s continuing aggressive paranoia, but, also, as a sort of making up, proving that *this time* the jews won’t be the passive wusses they proved themselves to be in WWII europe.
michael: paradise now, which i haven’t seen, is done by a palestinian director.
simon’s incisive comment got me thinking about something else. i really like the way in which folman represents the personal and collective process of remembering, or retrieving memories, or forming memories, and, ultimately, getting to know and verbalize the trauma. he portrays himself interviewing people, and people say things, but these things, most often, have little bearing with the traumatic memory he is trying to uncover or reconstruct and that eventually emerges. people remember dancing on the beach or seeing a red mercedes. little fragment of life that stuck with the conscious mind like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, or like those buoys and flags scuba divers use to signal that they are there.
and yet, these apparently irrelevant contributions on the part of strangers eventually do work on folman’s unconscious to dislodge the repressed memory and help him find the trauma.
so, i really liked the representation of the process of the (re)construction of individual and collective history as entirely non-linear, non-plot-oriented, but sketchy, based on triggers rather than storylines. i think it is brave and extremely cool of him to tackle memory in such a complex and disturbing way. disturbing because our unconsciouses are in the process prodded by the unconstricted way the witnesses get to narrate their encounters with horror, and disturbing because we see the traumatic memory emerge but there no clear path on how we got there — just traumatic buoy after traumatic buoy. also, notice the flat affect of the witnesses. it really gets under your skin.
Simon says so much with so little. Thanks for the recommendation, Gio. I am reconsidering whether I will handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict whatsoever. Because of relentless one-sided reporting for many years, I don’t know if there will be much hope for getting past the idea that Palestinians are all terrorists and Israelis all moral exemplars who only resort to violence when they absolutely have to.
Since my minimalist intervention was so badly misunderstood, I’m going to have to make my point laboriously, in words. Sigh.
I liked the film quite a lot, but I had some problems too. First (and I think some of you have been getting at this), the choice of interviewees is somewhat haphazard. The film does not ‘explain’ or ‘interpret’ Sabra and Shatila; it does not give a take on the Lebanon invasion itself (though the director does say, at one point, “I was scared of dying, and for what?” implying he doesn’t think the invasion was justified). So I was a little confused about just what the film was about. If anything, may main criticism would be that it lacked focus. This confusion of purpose (along with many of the film’s virtues), I think, is captured in the title – it’s quirky and kind of cool; the scene it derives from is pretty amazing (visually and musically); but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really say a whole lot about the film, the invasion, memory, or anything else. One barely even learns who Bashir was.
I also found the discussion of psychological processes a bit hokey, though their representation in the film itself, as Gio says, was quite good.
Of course, the whole thing about Israel as having become the abuser it was once abused by is very touchy, and credit to the director for getting into those issues at all. That said, again, I felt the treatment was not that deep. (BTW, Gio, I really have to take exception to your claim that Israel has been conducting a genocide against the Palestinians. I’ll give you oppression, apartheid, colonialism… but genocide?)
I do agree with Gio that the exclusion of Palestinian voices was not a problem; but that goes to the larger question of who is interviewed and why. When the director just interviews his former comrades, the point is clear. He’s just dealing with himself, his memories and his friends. But then he talks to psychologists (one of whom, clearly, is an old friend but who did not, as far we know, play any role in the invasion) and to the journalist Ron Ben Ishai and in the latter case, he seems to be wanting to establish something about who knew what and when for the historical record – but this project never really materializes.
And if you’re looking for the voices of the Palestinians, why not also those of the Phalangists. Their story, I’m sure, would be quite different too. So I think the narrow focus is fine; and although there’s stuff about trauma, I don’t think it’s trying to make the Israeli soldiers victims, exactly, though it does go some way towards trying to exonerate them.
Two interesting footnotes. a) I asked family in Israel whether Israel’s complicity in the massacres was an accepted fact, or whether the account given in this film was likely to be seen as controversial. I was told that most people did accept something like this conclusion. (If so, one has to wonder whether making this film was, from a political point of view, brave.) b)I found it very interesting that the director said, in one of the specials on the DVD, that the Israeli government quickly got behind this film because they realized that many people around the world thought that the massacres were actually carried out by the Israelis. Mere complicity counted as an improvement in their public image.
Michael, I understand your wariness of the whole issue, but if you do decide to go ahead with it, we just saw “The Syrian Bride” and I thought that was pretty good.
Now, wasn’t all this perfectly clear in 9.?
I’m away from home, so it’s been harder to access the blog here. (Time, plus I lost my password. But now…) You guys are, as Mark Wahlberg would say, wicked smart.