The Sabra-Shatila Massacre, conducted by Christian Phalangists against Palestinian and Lebanese Shi’ites during the Lebanese Civil War, was condemned as a genocide in 1982 by the United Nations General Assembly under the 1948 Convention. The term “Genocide”, first coined by Raphäel Lemkin in response to Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, was soon acknowledged as an international crime defined as any “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The shadow of genocide (and the Holocaust) looms heavily over the animated Israeli film Waltz With Bashir. Its director and “protagonist”¹, Ari Folman, himself a Lebanon War veteran and son of Holocaust survivors, bore witness to the massacre and subsequently suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, developing an amnesia that placed him outside of his complicity with the event. Using Waltz With Bashir, he attempts, as director and veteran, to re-animate the events of the war through the experiences of fellow Israeli soldiers to rediscover his own personal history. This essay will discuss the film’s use of animation and how its exploration of war crimes (and especially through its use of war film conventions and its depiction of violence) builds towards its ultimate goal of illustrating the Sabra-Shatila massacre as a repeat of Holocaust events.
(1. Protagonist in the sense that, though they are characters who share the same name and history, Folman’s character, like the others in the film, is fictionalised, an animated version of himself.)
Waltz With Bashir opens with a threatening shot of animated dogs running through a street towards the retreating camera. With fangs bared and eyes as yellow as the sickly sky behind them, these cartoon dogs announce that they are not the Disney variety. These are “Dogs of War”, threatening innocent people in a safe urban space. Eventually they stop and start barking at a man in a window, Boaz Rein Buskila, who explains that they are twenty-six dogs that keep reappearing in his nightmares; dogs that he first encountered in the Lebanon War. Professor Joram Ten Brink elaborates that these dogs are “an image of memory of violence” and by besieging the window they are breaking into the ‘“window of the mind’” just as the film does. When the film cuts to Boaz speaking with Ari Folman in a bar, they are also animated, the film mixing reality with the unconscious as though they are the same thing. Lead Artist David Polonsky explained that, “the point of view of the film is of the soldiers themselves”, saying that the street the dogs run through is based upon “the heart of bourgeois Tel Aviv” and that the Lebanese cityscapes were also inspired by “the northern part of Israel” which were “very similar to Lebanon”. By using Israel as a template for the dream sequence and later war scenes, Waltz With Bashir brings the violence home, the dogs and memories invading the city like the Israeli soldiers invaded Beirut and bursting the “seemingly protected bubble” of forgotten or obscured history. Stewart Garrett notes that the film ’s psychic topography “amounts less to an autobiographical through-line than to a layering of a collective unconscious”, the film’s use of several ‘testimonies’ constructing a picture of the war as opposed to one straight narrative.
The opening foreshadows the end of the film, with an image of victims running towards the camera. The dogs, shot by Boaz to prevent them alerting the Palestinians to Israeli presence, are the first victims of war that we see. The final victims of the film, the screaming women in the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps, run towards the camera. The dogs are “Dogs of War” in the Shakespearean sense, but also in the sense that they are victims of war, acting as an introduction to animals as surrogate victims before Folman is able to confront its human victims. Though we do see the Palestinian women of Sabra-Shatila in Folman’s first mental reconstruction of the massacre, they are as featureless as the dogs; animated simulations of the real victims. With the scene’s grey colour-palette and their faces frozen like Theatre Masks within their black headscarves, the victims are dehumanised and defined by the singlular emotion of grief. When they run towards Folman in his vision, they run around him as the camera pans around them. The impersonality of the camera, lacking focus on any subject save for Folman being placed in the centre-frame, illustrates how Folman is like the film, unready to see the victims of the massacre, his mind shielding him from the victims as they skirt around him like the camera. With this dehumanisation and twinning of the victims with the dogs, the victims are given a pack mentality, their collective grief reduced to an animalistic trait like that of the dogs. Waltz With Bashir’s illustration of the dehumanising nature of genocide links it to another artistic work depicting it: the graphic novel MAUS by Art Spiegelman.
Spiegelman, a second-generation Holocaust survivor like Folman, attempts to represent the unrepresentable in depicting the Holocaust. Responding to Theodor W. Adorno’s dictum that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” with the then-new medium of graphic novels, Spiegelman represents the unrepresentable differently from the art of the “barbaric” culture that had resulted in the Holocaust. Folman, seeing the Sabra-Shatila massacre as a repeat of Nazi atrocities, links his work to MAUS in depicting the “unrepresentable” genocide through the unconventional subjectivity of animation. In both, the genocides are seen through the testimonies of witnesses: in MAUS, Spiegelman’s father Vladek, and in Waltz With Bashir, the interviewees. Both works are informed by the subjectivity of human perception, as opposed to seeking historical truth. Folman understands, like Spiegelman, that testimonies can only be understood through the subjectivity of human memory, acting as “nonrepresentational representation” of history. With MAUS, Spiegelman depicts the Holocaust as Nazi cats exterminating Jewish mice. It takes the childish hallmarks of animation (commenting on the Nazis’ fixation with Mickey Mouse¹) and refigures the violent interplay of Tom and Jerry within a concentration camp. By using anthropomorphic animals to represent the Jews and Nazis, “Spiegelman concretises the ways in which contemporary discourses about Jews might have looked had they been transparently true, ironically revealing their inherent falsehood,” visually differentiating the Nazis and Jews to illustrate their lack of difference in real life, parody-parrying the Nazi imagery. Waltz With Bashir depicts the victims of the war as a collective entity, both threatening and horrifying in the memories of veterans, similarly non-representing the victims. The Israeli veterans are given more detailed faces, but not necessarily their own (the real-life Boaz refusing to have his face appear in the film, so the film created an animated simulacrum of his face) and all animated, also non-represented. Similarly to the Nazis in MAUS, the perpetrators of the massacre, the Phalangists, are never individually distinguished and are like the Palestinian victims in sharing an enigmatic, collective voicelessness. By non-representationally depicting the actors and victims by cartoonising them, both artists highlight the dehumanisation of bodies that occurs during genocides, and illustrate the differences of how the perpetrators and victims are perceived in memories and recollections.
(1. “Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed…the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal…Away with Jewish brutalisation of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse!” —Pomerania newspaper article, quoted in MAUS, p. 164)
Folman and Spiegelman place themselves in the position of the Nazis. Folman’s psychiatrist Ori Sivan notes that Folman, a soldier by the refugee camps firing flares up to light the night-time massacre (“Just (unquestioningly) following orders”), was, at the age of nineteen, “cast, unwillingly, in the role of the Nazi.” In the final sequence of the film, when Folman’s role in the massacre is revealed, the camera zooms forwards through a street of screaming women before it reaches the face of the young Ari Folman. The camera does not skirt around the women or Folman this time, instead passing through them before it places his face and eyes in centre-frame. The physical gap between him and the women is bridged by the camera, just as his connection to the massacre is bridged by the film. Recorded screams are heard during this abridgement before being diegetically placed with the film’s reveal of live action footage of the screaming women. With the focus previously having been on Folman’s eyes, the film implies that this live action footage is his point-of-view, the news-camera acting as a surrogate memory in place of Folman’s mind’s rejection. Folman places himself in the same position of two Nazi witnesses to the Holocaust, one of whom is made reference to in the film when the journalist Ron Ben-Yishai compares a boy from Sabra-Shatila to the Warsaw Ghetto photograph of the boy holding his hands in the air. By acting as cameraman, Folman is placed in the same position as the SS war criminal, Jürgen Stroop, who took the photograph, and German naval officer, Reinhard Weiner, who filmed the only one minute, fifty-nine seconds of known footage of the Holocaust.¹ By acting as a photographic witness of genocide, Folman demonstrates how posterity is defined by what records the perpetrators keep of their crimes and attempts, in placing himself in that same position, to reconstruct his own memories of the event and to rescue the victims of Sabra-Shatila from the same shackles the Nazis placed on the Jews through lack of representation on film.
(1. As opposed to the Allied films made upon discovering the camps.)
Art Spiegelman places himself in a Nazi perspective to demonstrate the power Nazis had over people’s perception of the Jews through their use of ideologically-influenced visual media. The non-representational representation was a technique not just used by Folman and Spiegelman, but by the Nazis themselves when they described the Jews as “vermin.” In a metatextual scene showing Spiegelman’s work-process, we see a sketch of him trying to decide how to depict his French wife who converted to Judaism. Spiegelman becomes aware of the power he holds over certain characters’ (and peoples’) representations. When his wife Françoise suggests the “bunny rabbit”, he responds that it’s “too sweet and gentle” an issue for him as it would misrepresent France with its “centuries of anti-semitism” and its collaboration with the Nazis. By placing such archetypical emphasis on race, Spiegelman demonstrates how our perception of his wife is shaped by his illustrations, that “the medium of transmission governs what we perceive to be true” in the same way Nazi propaganda about Jews dominated discussions about them in Germany throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. Spiegelman places himself in the same incriminating position as the Nazis to exorcise his own guilt as a second-generation Holocaust survivor and to demonstrate the control Nazis had over depictions of races and with that people’s perceptions of reality, which Spiegelman depicts in a later scene when his father tells him about a man in Auschwitz who claimed to be German, not Jewish. Placing two frames together, Spiegelman depicts the man first as a mouse, then as a cat. While the man’s identity was not discovered, our perception of him is decided, not by Spiegelman, but by the Nazis who decided to kill him. When Spiegelman depicts him being killed, he is a mouse killed by a cat. Regardless of whether he was Jewish or not, he was Jewish to the Nazis, the Nazis’ decision-making controlling Vladek’s memories of the event.¹ In placing themselves in Nazi positions, Folman and Spiegelman develop a greater understanding of how the Nazis and perpetrators of war crimes would control human perception of people and events through visual representation.
(1. Not dissimilar to Folman’s (and soldier Dror Harazi’s) own positions as witnesses.)
The artificiality of the comic book and animation highlights the subjectivity of the two works’ subject matters. Much of what is seen and described about the Holocaust and Lebanon War would have been impossible to record, due either to a lack of camera equipment or due to the subjective perception of the reality as described by the narrator. An unnamed soldier described by psychologist professor Zahava Solomon used his amateur photography gaze as a defence mechanism to perceive the war as a series of “amazing scenes, like the movies”. This line calls the reality of the film’s depiction (and any war film’s depiction) of war into question. As a visual medium, film focusses on dramatic imagery, with Waltz With Bashir focussing on the most visually distinctive moments of the veterans’ memories. “Watching everything as if through an imaginary camera” is a summary of Waltz With Bashir’s portrayal of reality, the camera being as much a part of the animation as the visuals. Cutting from Zahava Solomon’s interview scene to still, photograph-like images, the film demonstrates how even technology like the camera can produce subjective results that distort reality, especially of an event like Sabra-Shatila where few of the Israeli witnesses were aware of the events taking place in front of them. By depicting the unnamed soldier’s memories as still photographs, Folman shows how this defence mechanism can be broken by the horrors of war, the unnamed soldier’s camera “breaking” upon the sight of horse carcasses. The “still photograph” starts flickering across the screen like a film-reel (with film-reel sound effects), exposing the lie that these photographs were still images as opposed to cut freeze-frames spliced together. The admission of the camera technology’s as a stand-in for the human eye portrays the unnamed soldier’s return to reality, the defence mechanism’s destruction foreshadowing Folman’s use of live-action footage as a stand-in for his memories breaking the defence mechanism of animation. The extreme close-up of the horse’s eye foreshadows the shot-reverse shot between Folman’s animated face and the screaming live-action victims. It confesses that Folman’s use of animation, to create a false reality, is a means of masking reality. Spiegelman is also aware of how the artificiality of the comic book medium (and his perspective of his father) could do a disservice to the events MAUS depicts and to his father’s memory. He despairs, saying that “reality is too complex for comics” because “so much has to be left out or distorted”. Due to lack of photographic and filmic evidence of the Holocaust¹, many details are left to the memories of those who experienced it and their human imaginations, leaving Spiegelman frustrated at not knowing every detail, like when he struggles to illustrate the tin shop his father worked in within Auschwitz. Spiegelman explains that he “hate(s) to draw machinery” and by noting deliberate exclusions of details he shows how any visual medium can never be accurate, that there will always be errors in depictions of events. Spiegelman emphasises that he cannot depict his father perfectly because he has too many memories of Vladek’s imperfections.² The depiction of himself and his father as mice as much a racial allegory as it is visual shorthand for his inability to depict his father “realistically”. MAUS, like Waltz With Bashir, is informed by personal bias and subjectivity. If the film were live-action, or MAUS composed entirely from non-existent photographs, both artists argue that these would still be distorted by their creators’ dictation, the artist controlling the events as much as the perpetrators of those events.
(1. A deliberate ploy by Himmler to hide it from public consciousness.)
(2. Spiegelman despairing, “that worries me about the book I’m doing about him. In some ways he’s just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew…I’m just trying to portray my father accurately!” 133-134)
In its use of war film and war documentary conventions, Waltz With Bashir differentiates itself from both war documentaries and war films. War films are typically a process of public or military introspection or recollection, drawing from collective military and civilian experiences to imagine a picture of heroism or horror. War documentaries are typically fly-on-the-wall cinéma vérité, documented through found or official footage, news broadcasts and reportage, interviews and witness testimony, and are usually anti-war or critical of military actions. By using film styles from both while committing to neither, Folman creates a multi-layered psychic landscape of the war that captures multiple elements of its traumatising and damaging effects, capturing the day-to-day experiences of ground-troops resulting in both the comedic and disturbing. Dramatic or action-oriented scenes in film are interwoven with interviews of those who had been present, depicting the drama and documentation of the situations and emphasising that the events are memories as told from a perspective. Historical re-enactment in place of stock-military or found footage. When Carmi Cna’an describes the Phalangist “Slaughterhouse”¹ (where they would interrogate and execute the Palestinians) as like “being on an LSD trip”, the film responds in kind by depicting it in a surreal manner, panning quickly from Carmi’s idyllic home to a horror-movie wasteland, filled with Halloween-style trees, a crucifix-like post, rats, crows and even a man with a butcher’s knife. He describes things that would not have been amiss in Frankenstein’s laboratory or the Nazi experiment chambers, “body parts…preserved in jars”. It uses film’s visual shorthand for horror, not grounded in reality but “real” in what it conveys to the audience. By contrast, Dror Harazi’s account of the massacre is grounded in reality, the visuals matching his narration. When he describes the civilians being led out of the camps onto trucks, that is what we see. The Holocaust imagery persists, civilians being taken out of ghettos and packed into transports, but it lacks the Hollywood flare of Carmi’s narration. The animation remains consistent, but the visuals change depending on narrators, with Dror Harazi and Ron Ben-Yishai being the most meticulous in their accounts. Carmi, with his reliance on hallucinations, is far less sure of objective facts, saying “How should I know?” when asked where he first landed in Lebanon. War documentaries are supposed to supply context and explanations, but Waltz With Bashir gives a mix of vague recollection and documentation. The lack of context and detail emphasises the severity of the genocide that took place. Like Auschwitz or Treblinka, the locations of the film exist in liminal states of human perception, outside of mental and physical reality. Folman places the massacre next to the Holocaust as a “non-representational” event, explained by the murderous tendencies of humanity removed from their historical context. Waltz With Bashir is not a film about the soldiers and their experiences, nor is it about the political context of the fighting. It is about the casual attitudes towards violence that led to the soldiers’ complicity in a genocide.
(1. The name a reference to Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death which described the protagonist’s surreal experiences during the Second World War. The “Duty-Dance with Death” is also referenced in the film’s title: “Waltz with Bashir”.)
Casual violence is a prevalent visual motif throughout the film that is rarely brought up verbally. Through its use Folman exhibits a similar relaxed attitude to violence that complicit Europeans felt during the Second World War. Our first introduction to this is not actually in a flashback to the war, but rather with Carmi’s son. When Folman meets him in his home in The Netherlands, Carmi mentions that his son had been asking about his war experiences and if he’d shot anyone. When we see the son playing in the snow, he’s shown firing a toy gun and promptly trips in the snow. This panning side-view shot of someone falling is later mirrored during Roni Dayag’s story, where we see soldiers gunned down as they run across the beach. Carmi’s son playing “war” exhibits humanity’s propensity for violence, even in children (attested to when a child soldier is shown). The first war crime illustrated happens when Carmi and fellow rookie soldiers start “shooting like lunatics” at a car, completely ignorant of who might be inside. We’ve built to this moment as though it were the D-Day landings, soldiers running across the beach and crouching down for cover. The “old blue Mercedes” drives into the frame and looks threatening with its rusted, banged-up appearance. Carmi’s phrase “lunatics” implies a loss of rational thought, that they were “out of their minds.” We follow the soldiers’ points-of-view and become complicit with their gaze. But even when we get close-up shots of the car, we do not see “the bodies of a family” clearly, the film cutting back to Carmi’s interview, to pull us away from this horror.
Later on, however, the film does not shy away from the results of casual violence. In a darkly comedic montage started by a soldier using his gun as an air-guitar (visually introducing this visual shorthand of violence as play), we see a jet accidentally carpet bomb its own troops and a soldier fire an RPG at a random man’s car, mixed alongside a soldier frying an egg and another surfing, all to rock music. But when we come back to this montage just moments later during Frenkel’s commentary, we see the silhouette of a soldier gunned down by an insurgent vehicle, after he’s left behind by a helicopter. We follow the car and this time see it mow down a group of soldiers in front of a Wimpy’s. There is a fragility to these animated bodies, the bloodiness and violence of their deaths impacting more so than the earlier family’s death. We cut to a sniper-sight shot attempting to shoot the car, but it misses and shoots a man riding a donkey instead. Tanks try to destroy it and explode several buildings, while a jet’s missiles also miss the car and destroy a street. All of this is played for humour, reinforcing war as a game, the violence intercut with military men leisurely eating in holiday locations. But this lackadaisical attitude to violence is halted by the succeeding scene. In a tranquil moment set to Bach’s Concerto No. 5 in F Minor, we see a young boy hiding amongst the groves fire a rocket, in slow-motion, into the centre-frame, the calmness of his actions matching the music and stillness of the grove. When the scene cuts back to Frenkel in his interview, the music abruptly stops, so when we cut back to his memory, we are given a glimpse of the boy in centre-frame, before the film cuts to the reaction shot of the soldiers firing back in retaliation. The diegetic gunfire, in comparison to the piano music, is harsh, the muzzle flashes disturbing the peaceful grove. With the reverse-shot to the boy, we see his bloody corpse still in the centre-frame. After this shocking imagery, Frenkel confirms to Folman that he had been there, and had taken part in the killing of this child. The film’s build-up, from a child playing war, to casual destruction and murder to the instinctive shooting of a child soldier, prepares us and Folman for the later genocide, developing an understanding of the mentality that could commit such acts. Folman’s animated world reduces war to the banal, the commonplace and thoughtless, and with this introducing the tenets of the “banality of evil.”
The “banality of evil” was a sociological concept developed by Hannah Arendt during her analysis of the the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1960. Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal, was extraordinary in his ordinariness and his lack of critical thought about his actions. He was a soldier following orders, like the Israeli soldiers overseeing the massacre and even the Phalangists carrying out the genocide. Evil’s “banality” came in its lack of “roots”, Arendt writing that “the nature of evil itself is ‘thought-defying’…because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality’.” Evil is surface-level, people able to commit acts of evil because they refuse to think about it. “Arendt emphasises that the absence of critical thinking was common among ‘Eichmanns.’” The two-dimensionality of animation reflects this surface level. But where Folman and the Israeli soldiers differentiate themselves from the perpetrators of genocide is their willingness to remember their actions and consider them thoughtfully, and with this the animation gives them detail, exploring their experiences and granting them depth. The actual perpetrators, the Phalangists and the Israeli Minister of Defence Arik Sharon (who deliberately ignored reports of the massacre as it happened) are not granted this platform as the interviewees are. Folman denies them their voice because everything they’d say would be banal. Evil is not granted a platform. Their recollections would lack critical thought like Eichmann’s so they remain two-dimensional. Waltz With Bashir’s animation of genocide allows Folman to freely illustrate how and why the massacre happened. It develops an understanding of the mentality of both those who committed and those who witnessed. By looking at everything on the surface level Ari Folman is able to showcase his roots, to show us that he is not like Eichmann, that he will not be cast in “the role of the Nazi”.
Adorno, Theodor W., Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society (1967)
Antze, Paul & Michael Lambek ed., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York & London, Routledge, 1996)
Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem—I (The New Yorker, 1963)
Arendt, Hannah, Correspondence with Gershom Gerhard Scholem (The Library of Congress, 1963-1964)
Assy, Bethania, Eichmann, the Banality of Evil, and Thinking in Arendt’s Thought (Boston University, 1997)
Berlatsky, Eric L., ‘“It’s Enough Stories”: Truth and Experience in Art Spiegelman’s Maus’, The Real, The True and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and Ethics of Representation (Columbus, The Ohio State University Press, 2011)
Brink, Joram ten, “Animating Trauma: Waltz With Bashir, David Polonsky”, edited by Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer, Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence (London & New York, Wallflower Press, 2012)
Broderick, Mick and Antonio Traverso ed., Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media (London and New York, Routledge, 2011)
Smoodin, Eric, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons From The Sound Era (New Brunswick & New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1993)
Spiegelman, Art, The Complete MAUS (London, Penguin Group, 2003)
Stewart, Garrett, “Screen Memory in Waltz With Bashir”, edited by Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer, Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence (London & New York, Wallflower Press, 2012)
United Nations, Article II, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948
Winston, Brian, “‘Ça Va De Soi’: The Visual Representation of Violence in the Holocaust Documentary”, edited by Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer, Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence (London & New York, Wallflower Press, 2012)
Old University essay. Thought it was stupid wasting it in a memory stick.
Brooking The Vault 