This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 5, 2009 - The imaginative, mesmerizing "Waltz with Bashir," which is now playing at the Tivoli, is based on writer/director Ari Folman's experiences in the Israel army during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians in refugee camps by Christian Phalangists. The assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel inflamed pro-Israeli Lebanese Christians to take revenge on the Muslim community. Meantime, the Israeli army remained outside "guarding" the camps, while actually assisting the massacres by helping illuminate the camps with flares the Israelis shot into the sky.
At the Q&A session after the Telluride screening, writer/director Ari Folman explained the catalyst for the film. Finding his own memories elusive and indistinct, battling depression, Folman felt he could no longer ignore his suppressed experiences. A psychiatrist friend supported his exploration by talking with friends and fellow soldiers. Folman cited personal considerations of the nature of memory, repression of traumatic events and the surreal nature of violent confrontations. And so he videotaped interviews with friends, a psychologist, a reporter on hand during the 1980 war and others, some of whom battle unambiguous, traumatic memories.
Folman then used the video footage he'd recorded as the source for his film. However, he did not rotoscope them. In answer to questions about his working methods, Folman said several times that he could never have told the story with live actors. When asked why he chose animation, Folman replied, "There's no other way. It was animation or not at all. I can't imagine this in real-life action, only in drawings. It's like dreams, like one's self-consciousness, like lost memories. War is the most surreal experience, and animation gives freedom for its presentation. That was right for me."
When asked about his research, Folman said he did a lot of research, looking for stories from the beginning of the war. Then when he had too much material, he started writing the script, which became more and more his story. He added, "I shot all the interviews I could in a sound studio. We'd sit in the studio on stools. Sometimes we'd walk as we'd converse. I ended up with 90 minutes of video that I wanted to use from the interviews, the editing down to this taking a couple of months. That was then the reference for the animation.
"I did not rotoscope like Linklater's "Waking Life" because I thought the rotoscoping would keep the audience from being attached to the characters in the film. Instead, I storyboarded from the video and then went into state-of-the-art animatics, ending up with more than 3,000 frames. Then we started drawing and moving the images. We had eight animators, four illustrators and two people for effects. We needed two more people, but I couldn't find them in Israel, so the entire project took four years.
"The style of 80 percent of the film is primarily from one illustrator, David Polonsky. Polonsky wanted them to be as realistic as they could so audiences would be attached. I kept wanting more detail, which, of course, made it more difficult to finish. We combined Flash and Pixar-type animation and had a small budget."
Clearly excited about the animation, Folman continued, "There were three levels of design: one, the characters; two, dreams, which were wilder, more colorful and surreal; and three, the last part of the film, with fewer contours when talking about the massacre. It was more monochromatic because I wanted a depressing atmosphere to take over." Other surprising things happened. One man who contacted them, the swimmer, was very happy. "He said he'd been waiting 25 years to tell his story. We did, however, invent a couple of faces for people who said they wanted to be in the film but didn't want their families to know about their past."
When asked about the film's reception in Israel, Folman said, "Three months ago the film was released in Israel, and there was no political debate at all, a surprise to us. Nothing happened. The audience took it for what I was trying to convey - a personal, not a national, story. The only criticism came from the left, saying he didn't take enough blame for what went on in the camps.
"The animation at the end was the most difficult decision. The last animated shot changed a lot because it was complicated trying to figure out how to end it. I wanted to make a statement with the last shot. The soldiers were outside the camp, and my first memory was women running toward the checkpoints. For this footage, I always meant to have the real documentary footage because this puts the film in perspective. I wanted to prevent anyone thinking anywhere in the world that this didn't happen. More than 3,000 were slaughtered that weekend, and it's important for me to say this. That was an easy decision." Folman is referring here to the fact that the film concludes with a few minutes of actual (non-animated) news footage of the survivors, mostly women, coming out of the camps, and it is devastating. Viewers then see actual news footage of piles of corpses.
Folman added: "Lebanon is a very complicated country. I was sitting one time trying to figure out who was shooting at whom. Arab Christians have been very French-oriented and allies of the Israeli army and government. Now there's a constant war between Christians, Arabs and Palestinians. Bashir was a good-looking French leader elected president who was assassinated. To this day no one really knows for sure who did it. Whoever it was (some think the Syrians), the massacre was revenge for his death. When he was killed, Israeli troops were not in Palestine because two weeks before, an agreement was signed that has the Israeli army withdraw from Beirut. After the assassination, they went back in.
"While they were there, the massacre took three days. What did they know about what was going on? An investigation in Israel concluded they knew, and this included Sharon. Israel as a country was outraged when they learned what happened, and this was a major turning point in Israeli history, I think, because there was a break between the people and the leader in Israel.
"Other wars were all considered defensive wars. Lebanon was the first time the army invaded and the first time dealing with a big city and civilians. This changes everything. This is the war they don't talk about in Israel because of this, and this is the first film in 20 years to address it. It was not the Yom Kippur war about bravery and courage but something they were not proud of."
Folman concluded with comments about knowing and facing our respective histories.
"Waltz with Bashir," which screened as part of this year's St. Louis International Film Festival, is a unique, deeply moving, profoundly sad film of great artistry.
Diane Carson's film reviews can be heard on KDHX (88.1 FM).
The Lens is the blog of Cinema St. Louis, hosted by the Beacon.