Waltz with Bashir

I watched this movie on Youtube with a friend of mine the other day, and both of us were caught off guard. It is an animated foreign film (primarily spoken in English, however,)about a man who has lost his memory concerning his involvement in an Army mission of the first Lebanon war in the early Eighties. This is a kind of documentary with the filmmaker, Ari Folman, voicing himself as he interviews a number of people who were friends and comrades with him in the war.

I think one of the most astonishing things about this story is the power of the human mind; the ability of the mind to block it's owner of certain memories, or maybe more impressive, to literally fabricate an alternative explaination to traumatic events. For instance, there is a scene in which Ari is walking down a semi-damaged, abandoned terminal to find a place for the platoon to camp out, and for (at the very least,) minutes, he imagines that there are civilian people walking around, that everything is as it would normally be without a war. He is simply there on his own accord,not in the militaryand can travel where he wants . At some point, he realizes where he really is. I can't imagine fabricating just one person, let alone an entire world or environment. Another instance is when one of the soldiers is said to have viewed/remembered the war as through a camera lens (since he'd used to be a photographer) and disassociated himself from the ordeal, seeing himself only as an observer through a lens. This is similar to how the movie was shown; nearly the entire thing is animated save for a bit of footage that is actual footage of the devastation (which I think is a very very brilliant technique); until that point, the audience is only seeing the movie through animation- once actual footage is shown, it becomes something more concrete/direct.

We wondered at certain point of the film when damage was inflicted, did the soldier make the connection that they were responsible, or did they mentally shut down, and remove themselves from the action, as was the case for some? How would it be to realize that you were fireing shells or bombs or whatever, and then saw the destruction later, and knew that your action caused the result? I think the hardest part would be that you can't resolve taking a life; it's not like offending someone with words when you can confront and appologize later and then time will solve the rest. Once someone dies, that's it. They aren't physically coming back no matter how much time passes. That mistake or action's results are permanent. This is a tough movie, but I think it's better that we can understand it more; looking at percepolis, when the girl heard about the man who was tortured in jail, she and her friends didn't fully realize/understand the gravity of it, and made kind of their own game or justification of it when they were chasing the boy on the bike because of who his dad was.



We mentioned that after this, we will eventually forget the details of the movie, and quite quickly move on with our own lives, very uninterupted, but does this make us superficial, or is the story lost on us because we aren't too phased? No, becuase if we couldn't move on,we would have been effected too much to fix. It's good that when finished watching these kinds of movies, people can move on uninterupted, because we can take what we've learned from the experience of the movie without being negatively held back.

I know we've mentioned seeing God in films, and oddly enough, though there doesn't seem to be a note of hope by the end of the movie, I think this movie strengthens and furthers my belief in God and the necessity of Him. War is man made. To see a glimpse of what we as human beings can do, how we can cause so much damage to ourselves, there is no way that we are simply all that is, the highest moral beings without there being something higher. There is a necessity for us to be redeemed from this condition.