2 - Waltz With Bashir and Realism

by Isaac, Wes and Jonathan

Memory is one of the most fascinating thing about a human. We can remember our favourite times playing as a child to our adolescents, quote our favorites movies and lyrics from our favourite song, or unfortunately cannot forget some traumatic events. Some have the ability to memories everything in their daily lives, eidetic memory but mostly known as photographic memory, and some cannot even remember what they ate for breakfast that same day. Those who serve for their country often get diagnose with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder characterized by reliving a psychologically traumatic situation, long after any physical danger involved. Those who have PTSD treat it uniquely such as dreams. But sometimes dreams can be very real for some people. We have all experienced this at one point in our lives, a dream that very feels real but ends the moment we open our eyes. This affects our perception that we have between what is real and what is not. Suffering through a traumatic event can change one person’s perspective. One of the biggest change of perception that we witnessed after the events on September 11, 2001, that all Muslims are terrorist. Since then, terror struck the World about the views towards the Muslim people and now airports have been even more precautions, a war that has taken thousands of lives overseas, and fear has struck the world.                                              

Waltz with Bashir

(Ari Folman, 2008, Israel, 90 mins)

                                       

Waltz with Bashir, an animated biography directed by Ari Folman and released in 2008, is a great example of someone who is not able to tell the difference between what is real and what is not. The main character Ari has completely forgot his memory of his past during the war in Lebanon in 1982. Not only that he cannot retrieve his memory, but he imagines himself somewhere else during the war. He saw himself emerging from the water with two other people naked in the beach of Beirut while flares lite up the sky with an orange color at night. Ari Folman and the other two would walk out of the water and dress into their uniform and then walked among the citizen of Lebanon. This scene is both a hallucination and reality. Near the end of the documentary, there was a Palestinian massacre happening within the city but no one did anything about it because it was only known by the ear, meaning no one really saw what was happening, they turn the blind eye. During this time, flares were launched in the air and light up the night sky and Ari Folman was one of the soldiers launching these flares. When comforting an officer of higher rank, they did not believe it was happening because the news was brought from someone else that heard of these events and that was not enough evidence to proceed an investigation. Eventually, the massacre was put to an end. The reality of this scene were the events that happened but the hallucination was that his mind brought him on the outside of the city. This scene was shown three times over the course of the documentary.

The following video is a short documentary of the Lebanon war in 1982 during that time. It helps us understand what is happening during those events with an interview with Ariel Sharon, the Israel Defense minister in 1982.

He begins his hunt to retrieve his train of thought by asking old friend who were next to him on the battlefield and other allies during the Lebanese war. Before he decided to retrace his steps, a friend came to him that he has dreamt in the past few nights that 26 dogs came running and barking at his house. Those 26 dogs represents the amount of dogs he has shot when he was in war in order to enter a Lebanese village, another form of PTSD. However the dogs can also be read as a metaphor representing the Phalangist on their killing spree or the Israeli troops invading Lebanon (A Soldiers Tale by Ali Jaafar). He has been having the same dream for the past two years in a half.

At one point in the movie, Ari Folman is at an airport and in his memory, the airport looked like a normal airport in Lebanon with the clean gift shops, duty free stores, airplanes, with the flight board showing delayed/canceled flights to Paris, London, New York and other locations. But in reality, the airport was destroyed with half airplanes in the runway, gift shops were destroyed, the flight board had bullet holes in them, etc. As you can see, our mind plays tricks with us by deceiving us from reality, but it can also be a way of escaping it as well. Ari Folman’s friend, who was a soldier during the same war, wanted to escape the reality that he was living through. One of the many ways of escaping reality is by dreaming. When he is scared, he starts to sleep and hallucinate. He once falls asleep on the boat that he was traveling in and dreamt of a giant naked lady who would come and pick him up off the boat and swims away as he watches the boat catch on fire.

Ari Folman would add some funny scenes too, in a way it distract us from the reality of war and death. During the last scene of the movie, he makes a translation from the animated movie to an actual footage of the city of Beirut, but the sounds of crying and screaming men, women and children were kept from the footage. The details were very precise in the animated motion picture.

This documentary is not the usual style of documentary that we commonly see, but we can find some resemblance during the movie, for instance they reenact the interviews that Ari Folman has with some experts on psychology or those who were present in the war and by adding their names in both Hebrew and English. The animated style gave a soft touch to the movie by not showing actual images from these gruesome events but we viewers look aside from that because we know that those events are real. We know that these are motion pictures and we do not see them as humans but only cartoons. The best example to help us understand was the scene when some horses were slowly dying. We humans have a great love and affection for animals, a lot of us have domestic animals running around their houses. When it comes to animals being shown in a motion picture, we feel more attached to them and so when we see an animal dying, we are very heartbroken to see that. We sometimes laugh at certain death in this documentary but when we saw the poor horses slowly dying, no one was laughing. The animation made it easier for the directors to re-act the hallucination scenes and let them be as creative as possible. War is never a pretty thing to look at, the animation made the views more comfortable by not being too attached to the characters or so the audience does not feel as sympathetic for those who lost their lives

                                                  

                          Persepolis

(Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, 2007, France, 96 mins) 

The supplemental film we viewed together was named Persepolis an auto-biographical film of Marjane Satrapi, directed by herself and Paronnaud that shows us the life she had growing up during the beginning of the warring era and revolution of Iran. With this movie, we learn more about what it was like, living during the 1980s in the Iraq-Iran war and the Islamic Revolution, and the subjects the movie touches most on is realism and memory, of point of view and public perception and was a very beautiful movie to see, in our opinion. The movie begins with her in the Orly airport as a young woman, with everything coloured save for the faces of the people. But then begins a narrative in the first person, showing her past as a young, curious child, living a regular life, with a freedom that resembles our own. Marjane wore her own clothes, enjoyed rock music, her role model in life was Bruce Lee and she even had stylish Nike sneakers to run around with.  She grows up from the beginning of the Iranian Revolution and sees the instalment of the fundamentalist party that relies on the sacred texts for their laws, her rights and freedom slowly dwindles as she faces war, the destruction and death and the gendered oppression. Her individuality is taken away from her and right to speech has been banned.

           

The following video is a short documentary about the history of Iran before the events that occurred in 1978. This video helps us understand the years of anger of the Iranian people to lead them into the captivity of the Americans for 444 days. 

 Marjane’s life has been drenched in war and survival, when she was just a child the Islamic revolution launched in 1979. After the fundamentalist party installs its authority, the laws became more and more oppressive over time, beginning with the banning of what would be considered “western decadence”, such as music, fashion, and alcohol. At one point, we are shown Marjane buying Iron Maiden CDs from a black market like area, where the men would whisper their wares to those who seemed interested, and she is almost caught by two women who scold her for being outside alone and wearing custom clothing that she had made for herself to wear over her veil. The women had to be modestly dressed and wore black veils to hide their hair, as to not tempt the men. Her uncle who was detained by the old government for nine years gets imprisoned and executed for his communist and rebellious ideas. As she grows up, the laws become more and more oppressive and she faces several injustices such as how her uncle dies at the hands of an under-equipped and probably qualified hospital that would not let him go abroad for better service and fights the educational lies and propaganda with her own eyes and experience of the situation firsthand.

Eventually, her parents send her to Vienna to one of her mom’s friends for her safety, and at their doorstep, they tell her they cannot keep her, so Marjane ends up in a Christian boarding school with moderately racist nuns who took care of her until vacation came along and she was home alone and got kicked out for “poor manners” and talking back. She hops houses until she finds a psychologist with a pet dog who takes her in. She finds a new school, makes some friends, has a generally good time and studies in Marxist-Leninist communism and lives a more or less fun life. But after a while things start going downhill, she begins to lie to herself, her friends are nihilist and pretentious, and negate the meaning behind life, she finds offense for the death of her people who died trying to fight for a better tomorrow. She has a few love stories and goes back home after nearly dying of pneumonia after getting kicked out of her room and her boyfriend cheating on her.

            

She comes back and lives in a state of depression and does nothing but watch TV all day and all night while asking her parents not to ask anything of what had happened. Eventually she breaks out of it and continues her education, and goes to several illegal parties in which one of her friends gets killed after running from the cops. 

By the end of the film, Marjane is a young woman, who has already married once, and she is banned from returning to the country by her mother, for her political ideals, and the country is still seeped in war and destruction.

The film was shown in an animated black and white style, an autobiographical retelling of her teenage years growing up which give us the impression that the beginning and end of the story are of a present time, that when she’s shown in the Orly Airport in Paris, suddenly there is colour to the scenery, particularly her and the clothing of others, but everyone’s face are still a plain white. I believe she wanted to make the story simpler, as everyone was one and the same, and nobody is racialized in this context and perhaps even that a revolution or a war can happen anywhere, anytime, to any people. But I believe this written essay by Melissa Conway gives a more complete and fulfilling analysis of the colour used in both the film and the novel.

            Like Waltz with Bashir, memory was also an important factor in this movie, or more particularly, this entire documentary was a recollection from the beginning to end of Marjane’s life, her view, what she remembers and what she held dearly from her experiences. Memory is not entirely reliable, as we have seen in class and can change depending on how we want to view it, things like people telling us we were at events people when we weren’t actually present may make us believe we actually were there. Thus, there is this obvious bias in terms of how some scenes could have been portrayed, especially since what we only see is a retelling of her past in a first person narrative and there are no actual interactions with her parents or family members other than what she remembers he said. Whether she referred to them during the production is yet to be seen, but I believe the point of this movie was less to remain objective, but just to give the viewer an insight on what she, and most likely other children, had to go through during those times.

            To add to this, another reason I believe this movie can teach us of much, were because of the scenes of realism portrayed. There is one scene when she is a young child, not even a teenager, and Iraq sends a missile that landed near her very own house. She finds her mother unscathed and we feel a sense of relief, but then she reveals whose house it was, and we see a hand sticking out from the rubble. We know this is a real scene because we’ve seen it ourselves, not with our own eyes, but with Ari’s eyes, you could almost call it the exact same scene with the dead child with his hand and head sticking out, and she had to see this reality at an even younger age. She nearly dies of pneumonia from sleeping on benches for four months and scouring trash for food, we also see this reality and it is actually very close to us, the homeless and the beggars have nowhere to go and are left to die sadly.

         

   Her friends in Vienna were very pretentious as well, they were nice people but at some point they adopt very nihilistic views and treat life as meaningless. Marjane takes a deep offense to this as she cries for what her people have died for, what her people are still fighting for, what her people are still being killed for, they haven’t died meaninglessly, and it shows us how sheltered we are ourselves. We don’t realize the gravity of war, we haven’t had to see war ourselves or live through it and fear each die that a bomb or a missile does not drop on our house. We haven’t been under an oppressed government that limits our freedom severely and takes away everything from a strict observation of some religious texts and laws. I think one message the film and the author and director believes in and wanted to show us is how immature we are, but not in a way that scolds us, but one to teach us, for a better future and to not repeat the past mistakes.

Here is an article by the TehranTimes, an English newspaper in Iran that broadcast international news. This article was published February 4th, 2014 and it explains the history year after year to the present day of Iran's 35th anniversary of the victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

Personal Reflection

Documentary films show us about events and about important historic events in our world. Like in the movie Waltz with Bashir it shows us the war in Lebanon in 1982 and in Persepolis it shows us the conflicts that Iran had gone through. Even though they are animated the two movies still show us the trouble and disaster that is going on in their country. These types of documentary do not only tell us a historical event, but show us the difficulty of the lives of a citizen or of a soldier. The concept of using animation helps to show us the story and all the violence but since it is in animation not a real film, it makes it easier for us to watch the events that’s happened. The black in white in Persepolis shows us the darkness and sadness and the fear that the citizens of the country went through, it was a good way to express these emotions to us. In the end, animation was a good choice for both directors, it is a unique way to capture the audience’s attention and it saves a lot of money for them. What we really amazed us was at the end of Waltz with Bashir, the animation was an exact replica of an actual footage of men and women crying at the sight of bodies lying around and building brought to the ground. Before showing the video, the director showed us the animation version with the actual audio footage and then translated it to the raw video. The ending of the video shows the viewers the tragedy, the horror and the fear of what they have gone thought.

The following video is the last scene of the documentary Waltz with Bashir where the director made a translation from animation to an actual footage of the events. Note: The following content contains disturbing images, viewer’s discretion advised.   

 We can see the difference that we Canadians have comparing to other parts of the world, even though those events were in the past. We have it easy and we unfortunately takes it for granted: free health care, no religion police, not forced into serving our country, no dictatorship and many other benefits that we have. After seeing this movie we look at the world differently. We are free to be who you want, to be we are accepted for who we are no matter what we believe in, no matter our skin color we are accepted for who we are. Also when we wake up, we are not scared of being judged or attacked in the streets, our women are not considered as second class citizen or minority, etc. One of the group members has a similar personal experience.

My two parents came from very famous countries that made a name for themselves during the cold war, my mother would always remind me how lucky I am to have been born here, and naturally, I did feel grateful at first but as it would get repeated, I would take it for granted and not realize how simple I have it in Canada. My father is from Afghanistan and although I have not talked to him about his past, he told me he took all his brothers and sisters and fled the country due to some scandal with the government that were secretly on the side of the USSR. I assume he declined and was prosecuted since he hated speaking of it but watching Persepolis gave me an idea of what he could have gone through at a younger age, and seeing how Afghanistan is right next to Iran and Iraq, his country probably was not untouched either from their conflict. I do not want to make it sound like I now have a stereotype of middle-eastern countries that have done nothing but war the last few decades, but it is worrying that there are so many conflicts all the time that still persist today.

One of the group members father is originally born in in Hong Kong, China and moved here when he was 18 years old. He has lived here for the past four decades in the west culture and he has changed his views about the politics, the government, about rights and other problems around the world and now he rarely practices the old Chinese traditions. However his mother is still practicing all the traditions and holidays and the siblings who live around her practice them with her. A clear example from the movie Persepolis when the grandmother kept saying during the entire documentary do not forget who you are.

Another group member has a personal experience with the poverty in another country. One day in Cuba, his father had a coffee mug and he was at the beach with his family and a Cuban came up to his family and asked if his family could spare anything for his family at home. However the only thing they had at the beach was a coffee mug so they asked the Cuban if he would like to have the coffee mug and as soon as the family asked the Cubans face lit up he was so happy to have the mug he almost started to cry right in front of us and when I saw that happen I then realized how poor they were and much we take stuff for granted. These moments are small compared to organizations travelling the world trying to end world hunger, or to free child soldier or to raise money to build a fountain in third world countries but they do mean a lot for us and they still are an eye opener.

At the first glance, the two movies we watched Waltz with Bashir and Persepolis you wouldn’t think they are similar, but they are. Each one shows a staple of what goes on in the middle-east; one of them is a war veteran’s point of view, while the other is a victim of the trauma involved. Both documentaries reflect on memory and perception of the people the documentaries were centered on, and show us the suffering, the trauma, the pain they have experienced that then turns into a haunting past. With Ari Folman fighting in the Lebanese war to Marjane living her adolescence through wars, governmental oppression and revolution in Iran, you can see that their view has changed and that they mature accordingly. We see what brings up Marjane Satrapi, a sense of integrity, belonging, pride and respect for her nation, despite how war torn it was. She ends up banned by her mother from ever coming back and she respects this decision as she knows, there is a more peaceful world out there, but she never forgets who she is, and even brings us her two graphic novels and documentary to teach other people and children. Ari Folman, likewise also brought us a documentary to give us the truth and brutality of his past, he gets haunted by the twenty-six dogs of war and decides to find the truth to his past, to discover his role, his dream, and maybe even find a meaning to his own life. As we progressed through the two movies, we can understand a deep regret from the two authors of what war really meant, what is the result of war, what did war actually solve? Unfortunately, these events are marked in our history and many people have made up their mind on their view towards these events thanks to political propaganda and the Hollywood theme of heroism in war.