A FILM CRITIQUE OF Waltz with Bashir (2008)

James mushabac Lowens

Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) ends with a startling leap out of animation and into documentary footage. The camera pans over piles of dead bodies and wailing widows. Facing directly into the camera a bereaved Arab mother excoriates the Israeli cinematographers: ‘film it, film it, where are the Arabs?’ (sawwaru, sawwaru, wein al-Arab?). 

This essay scrutinizes the therapeutic function of Waltz with Bashir with a return to the psychoanalytic terrain of trauma. The film explicitly considers itself a kind of therapeutic act: for the director, for the viewers, for Israel itself. But what kind of therapy is this? The history of psychoanalysis presents two radically different approaches to the traumatic event: on the one hand the work of assimilation [1] and on the other hand, the work of dissolution.[2] When trauma threatens the temporal integrity of the ego, analysis might move in either direction. The former restores and recuperates; the latter aggravates and accelerates. 

At stake here is both the nature of the trauma and the nature of the cure—and, crucially therein, the function of the moving image. Raz Yosef has articulated perhaps the only scholarly consensus about the film’s final scene: it dramatizes the radical disjuncture between individual and collective experience opened up by the experience of trauma.[3] Here trauma is a kind of non-experience, a kind of alienation—by extension, therapy must perform a kind of activation or revitalization. This schematization of trauma also necessarily reads into the woman’s question a kind of ‘play of mirrors.’[4] The woman’s question reflects trauma back onto the traumatized in a kind of double-detachment: there is no encounter here, only the mutual recognition of absence.

But Yosef’s schematization rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the structure of trauma as conceived by Freud and elaborated by Lacan. Yosef cites psychoanalysis; but what Yosef calls ‘trauma’ is notthe trauma of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s psychoanalysis meets the ethical demands of trauma studies with terminological precision. If we are to follow Yosef into the psychoanalytic dictionary (alongside the vast majority of scholarship on Waltz with Bashir), we’d be remiss not to meet the challenge of trauma (and the woman’s question) with our own theoretical rigor. 

When Yosef writes about ‘trauma’ he unintentionally describes its opposite: ‘jouissance’ (enjoyment). ‘Jouissance’ is the necessary consequence of an intimate identification with the the structural ephemera of a signifying chain. ‘Jouissance’ simultaneously sustains the individual and nourishes the continuity of the social: it is both an individual and a collective experience. Yosef describes this split—between the individual and the collective—but overlooks its eminently political function. Detachment can be a collective experience, especially in traumatized territory, in occupied territory. In the case of Zionist militarism an entire social fabric rests upon its political operability. 

There does exist a way out, a secondary process, a detachment from detachment—trauma. For Lacan, following Freud, trauma gestures toward a radical presence: the presence of a disturbing kernel, the kernel of ‘the Real.’ This is far from Yosef’s alienation. This is direct, unmediated contact. A traumatic encounter presents a kind of ethical opportunity: through the structure of trauma—not ‘jouissance’—one might glimpse the radical contingency of a signifying chain and in so doing attenuate its inaugural violence (identification). Here we have not assimilation, but rather, dissolution—and it is precisely dissolution that the woman’s question demands. 

But this is not the kind of therapy Waltz with Bashir provides. The film conjures a set of aesthetic innovations to continue to dodge and evade even as it seems to confront. Its therapeutic function as assimilation is inseparable from the distinct narrative capacities of film technology. Here again the question of trauma meets the ethics of representation: narrative, visual, theatrical, musical. 

The film conjures a signifying chain to assimilate the trauma of Sabra and Shatila. The event becomes legible through a network of signification—through a series of visual cues and a series of citations. This essay scrutinizes this network. Section (1) addresses the function of color alongside the question of legibility. Section (2) engages the film’s network of citations, and in particular its references to movements in nineteenth-century European art and literature. Colors and citations perform a particular therapeutic operation irrespective of their author’s intention. They delineate an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside:’ they situate the ‘traumatic’ event in its proper place. 

Shock and trauma are not coterminous—neither are pleasure and enjoyment. These are precisely the lessons psychoanalysis brings to bear on the study of images. If an image is readable it cannot be called ‘traumatic’—painful, perhaps, but not traumatic. Pain is not an ethical position.[5] With the aid of theatrical spectacle pain becomes catharsis, a necessary and eminently social operation. This is the therapeutic function of Waltz with Bashir. 

Color: Yellow and Gold

This particular color scheme appears in just three spaces: first, in the dream-sequence at the film’s beginning (a); second, in Folman’s recurring dream-sequence (b); and finally, at the film’s end, in its portrayal of the events at Sabra and Shatila (c). It functions as a kind of filmic ritornello: when the film goes golden-yellow, we enter the dreamscape, the space of ‘traumatic’ experience. 

(a)                                                                   (b)                                                             (c)

Let us begin with the image at the center—Folman’s dream (b). The sequence occurs for the first time in the immediate aftermath of Folman’s conversation with another traumatized soldier—the sequence with the dogs (a). Here we have a chain, from (a) to (b), and then eventually, to (c). It is precisely his reflections on (a) that bring Folman to (b). 

It is as if the golden-yellow dreamscape is contagious. Looking out onto the ocean Folman turns his head slightly and the color palette shifts: a kind of golden-yellow light illuminates grey and rainy Tel Aviv—Tel Aviv looks just like the shores of Folman’s dreamscape Beirut (c). By the time the film reaches the third image (c) it has already prepared us to read Sabra and Shatila within the codified chain above: as hallucination, as unreal.

For Raz Yosef the world of ‘symbols and hallucinations’ in Waltz with Bashir marks the point at which collective memory and individual experience diverge. By emphasizing the subjective (hallucinatory) dimension of memories and experiences, Yosef explains, the film conjures an ‘atemporal zone… away from the continuities of national history.’[6] Here Yosef draws upon Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘places of memory’ (lieux de mémoires): the film, like Nora’s ‘places of memory,’ stops time: it ‘escapes from history’ into the atemporal world of the museum, the monument, the symbolic ceremony and the festival. 

These spaces qualify as ‘atemporal’ for Nora because they mark the place at which the past becomes crystallized—at which it becomes legible as separate, at a distance.[7] Yael Munk echoes Yosef’s argument, but goes a step further: ‘being individual confessions of trauma, [the film] construct[s] a narrative limited to one single point of view… not… a point of negotiation between collective and personal history… but rather… an ultimate personal history in which the nation and the national are absent….’[8]

Munk and Yosef simultaneously misplace the ‘atemporal’ and wholly overlook its political function. Israeli Zionism conceives of itself as a Jewish return to history, the rectification of exile, of an original trauma. This particular narrative hinges upon distinction: it distinguishes between the ‘atemporal’ space of diaspora and the ‘historical’ territory of Israel post-1948.[9] Is Folman’s yellow-and-gold then simply the space of the anti-national, a kind of ‘diasporic’ space of absence, of lack? For Munk and Yosef, the answer is yes—atemporal, anti-national, diasporic. Trauma, then, is an encounter with absence: in this film, localizable to Folman’s ‘places of memory.’ But what kind of encounter occurs in these spaces?Trauma may indeed be such an encounter. But again, one can ‘encounter absence’ in two radically different ways: as a space already curved by absence or lack (assimilation), or as absence itself (dissolution). The former is Lacan’s ‘jouissance,’ the latter is Lacan’s ‘trauma.’ 

What Munk and Yosef miss is color—and not just any color, but a nexus of color we’ve been prepared to read very specifically. Yellow-and-gold is not ‘nothing;’ yellow-and-gold is something: something readable. It is against the film’s other color schemes that we must read the film’s final sequence: not as a separate space of ‘hallucination’ but, precisely by virtue of contrast, as a space of continuity with previous ‘dreams.’ 

We need only situate the space of ‘hallucination’ next to the space of ‘flashback’ to illustrate this point. In his first real flashback Folman remembers one particularly dangerous mission, in which his commanding officer charges him and his comrades with transporting dead bodies back to base. ‘Where should I dump the bodies?’ Folman asks. The reply: ‘out there, near that bright light’ (or gadol). When Folman and his comrades arrive at base camp they encounter not the golden light of traumatic memory but instead a harsh bright white against a greenish black. This is ‘real’, not a dream, but a flashback: ‘not a hallucination, nor my subconscious.’ This is the space of dead Israelis.

The film ‘dumps its bodies’ at another bright light at the film’s end, this time shot through with a familiar signifier of delirium. This is the site not of traumatic encounter with ‘the Real’ of mass murder. This is a prefabricated space into which we arrive well-prepared—not with the shock of an illegible image, but, paradoxically, with the relief of a return to the familiar. 

If this is continuity and not rupture, then Folman’s Sabra and Shatila has a very precise political function—not to traumatize, but to assimilate. Here again we might return to Lacan’s formulation, and to Yosef’s misreading. To recapitulate: for Yosef the structure of trauma opens up a chasm between individual and collective experience. For Lacan, in contrast, this very gap is the divided subject—the subject isthis separation, this chasm, and he experiences this chasm as ‘jouissance.’ What Yosef labels ‘trauma’ (detachment) is in fact the magnetic attraction of two inseparable poles at the sight of subjectivation. For Lacan trauma operates more directly in the oppositedirection: a traumatic encounter occurs when the divided subject glimpses the ‘Real’ outside, beyond, or beneath the symbolic order. This kind of encounter leaves intact neither the symbolic order nor the divided subject. We might call the film’s final sequence traumatic only if it functions along these lines—if it dissolves, if it remains illegible. This does not occur. Color prepares us to register the film’s final scene in a particular way—Sabra and Shatila remains wholly within a codified symbolic space.

Citation 

Folman screens Sabra and Shatila inside the yellow-and-gold space of Israeli ‘jouissance.’ But the vast majority of Folman’s film takes place outside the event itself. We have already glimpsed the visual code of the ‘outside’in the space of bright light and dead Israelis. But this is just one example; and if our concern here is legibility then Folman’s outside demands its own meticulous treatment. 

The film’sfinal ‘encounter’ with ‘the Arabs’ takes place through layers of mediation—in particular, the mediation of European art. The film dips into and out of various stylistic modes with diasporic virtuosity. Folman goes in search of lost time (for Sabra and Shatila) and finds along the way Europe and its many modalities. Visually, in one form or another Folman pays tribute to the Dutch Golden Age (a), to French Impressionism (b), and to Gothic horror (c). 

(a)                                                                 (b)                                                            (c)

Let’s begin with citation (a), the Dutch Golden Age. Folman’s therapist delivers an encomium to memory and ‘memory takes us where we need to go:’ to Holland. Folman then pastes himself and his friend Carmi C’naan as moving silhouettes atop the placid provincial landsacpe. The contrast is stark: the painterly backdrop throws animated Folman and C’naan into stark relief. The backdrop might just as well come from Pieter Brueghel. 

Later on, ‘memory takes us’ to a French Impressionist garden in Beirut (b). There is a particular shade of green that appears only here, in gardens. In stark contrast to Folman’s Dutch Golden Age tribute, here Folman’s own animation fits seamlessly into the European school to which he pays tribute. 

When Folman returns to Holland with a basket full of memories, the Dutch Golden Age backdrop assumes the Impressionist green of the Lebanese garden. Folman and his friend C’naan fit into the landscape perfectly. ‘I’m starting to remember,’ C’naan explains. As he begins to remember, the characters begin to assimilate to the European backdrop, reconciling two Israelis to both Impressionism and the Dutch Golden Age. Here it is recollection—as a kind of citation-synthesis —which situates the two men squarely in the present. 

This is not simply Folman flexing the breadth of his artistic acumen by allusion. Citations are a kind of mediation. They are an invocation of memory, a way to contextualize or assimilate within the already known or the possibly knowable.[10] Ironically, Folman cites European art to mark the point at which a ‘traumatic encounter’ ends and other kinds of experience begin—memory and recollection, for example. Citations separate Sabra and Shatila from both the present and the past. They separate Holland from Beirut. Sabra and Shatila is not French Impressionism, not the Dutch Golden Age, notGothic Horror. It is its own, singular place—a space of yellow and gold.

Citations also separate witnesses from perpetrators. The film makes an abrupt shift into gothic horror directly on the heels of its placid moment of citation-synthesis. Folman litters the landscape with nearly every conceivable gothic cliché: empty jars, wandering men with flashlights, barren trees, a graveyard cross, black cats and crows, rats, a castle, eyeballs in jars, a man with a cleaver, a severed hand—the list goes on. Various shades of black and grey define the contours of items against a backdrop of radioactive yellow-green.  

Here Folman indiscriminately mobilizes tropes of the European gothic to separate Israelis from the barbarous bloodthirsty Phalangists, the proprietors of the ‘slaughterhouse.’ C’naan remembers the gruesome details of a Phalange torture chamber, the ‘slaughterhouse:’ ‘it was like being on an LSD trip. They carried body parts of murdered Palestinians preserved in jars of formaldehyde. They had fingers, eyeballs, anything you wanted.’

‘I’m starting to remember,’ says Carmi C’naan, as his animated body begins to match the green backdrop. And then the ‘camera’ pans out and finds Folman at his therapists, in Israel, no longer in the Dutch Golden Age or the era of French Impressionism, no longer with the German Baroque or the European Gothic. He has returned to Israel, to his therapist’s office, and it is precisely here that the chain of citations break down: ‘I’ve reached a dead end.’ He has reached the end of his European citations, that is to say, the end of European history. Folman’s therapist leads him there, to the ‘end’ of Jewish-European history—Sabra and Shatila. 

Dutch Golden age artists attempted to meticulously render reality in its exactitude. Impressionists inaugurated modern art’s departure from ‘reality.’ But Impressionism departs only partially: away from the empirical and into the phenomenological, away from contours and distinctions and into the world of light and shadow. The movement loosens up its grip on contour and in so doing illuminates a world of impression, a world of movement and color. 

This is precisely what happens when Folman's film slips into yellow and gold. Folman’s Impressionist garden alludes to this ‘doubling’ of reality—into contour and shade, perception and memory, experience and trauma. When Folman reconciles Impressionism to the Dutch Golden Age at the moment in which Folman and C’naan ‘start to remember,’ shade and contour come together: here experience and memory for the first (and only) time begin to coincide. This, I argue, is the film’s apotheosis—notthe film’s final scene. This is the moment an encounter with ‘the Real’ becomes possible—in other words, here for the first time we glimpse a glimmer of the ethical possibilities of trauma—not ‘jouissance,’ not the signifier. 

‘Stop the Shooting’ 

But here Folman relents. The film reverts to yellow and gold (to the signifying chain) at precisely the moment ‘the Real’ begins to emerge. The film retreats at the moment unmediated experience begins to ‘arise.’[11]

An Israeli general issues an order to the Arab refugees and the Phalangist perpetrators: ‘stop the shooting. Stop the shooting immediately… Everybody go home. Go home, now.’ The general gives his order at dawn—the lighting is perfect—next to a tank that points directly at the camp.  

The Arabs ‘go home’ to the camp, but the shooting doesn’t stop. Israeli journalist and war photographer Ron Ben Yishai follows close behind: ‘The Palestinians?’ - ‘Yes.’ - I said to my men, ‘we’re going in with them… with those women and children. We’ll see what happened in there.’ In the film’s final lines, Ben Yishai details exactly what he sees in the camp:

My eye caught a hand, a small hand. A child’s hand stuck out from the rubble. I looked a bit closer and saw curls. A head of curls covered in dust… it was a head, exposed up to the nose. A hand and a head. My own daughter was the same age as that little girl. And she had curly hair, too… courtyards… full of bodies of women and children…. We entered one alley, a very narrow alley… piled up to the height of a man’s chest with the bodies of young men. That’s when I became aware of the results of the massacre. [12] 

The camera follows Ben Yishai as he looks at the rubble and ‘catches’ a hand. Behind him the grieving Palestinian Arabs walk forward without looking. Here the camera has the privilege to see its own daughters. The victims march on unable to look, while the Israeli journalist looks on with horror, unabashed. The Israeli violence is twofold. First the IDF fires flares as their allies massacre civilians. Then the music stops and ‘the shooting’ continues. Here Israelis answer the woman’s question—'where are the Arabs?’ ‘The Arabs’ are here, on the screen. 

Afterthoughts 

There are two therapies and two screens—a screen to assimilate and a screen to dissolve. Waltz with Bashir provides the former; Sabra and Shatila calls for the latter—a revolutionary-ethical screen. This is precisely the point at which Ella Shohat concludes her seminal Israeli Cinema(1989): 

True cinematic polyphony will emerge, most probably, only with the advent of political equality and cultural reciprocity… but until the advent of such a utopian moment, cultural and political polyphony might be filmically evoked, at least, through the proleptic procedures of ‘anticipatory’ texts, texts at once militantly imaginative and resonantly multivoiced.[13]

Even in its earnest attempt to engage the problematics of traumatic memory Waltz with Bashir does not begin to approach Shohat’s ‘resonant multivocality.’ Thirty years after Shohat’s Israeli Cinema we might post the same question to Ari Folman, and indeed to Israel film. What do you anticipate?—that is, who are you, and where are you going?  

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1977. Print. 

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Print. 

Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.  

Munk, Yael. “From National Heroes to Postnational Witnesses: A Reconstruction of Israeli Soldiers’ Cinematic Narratives as Witnesses of History,” in Harris, Rachel S. and Omer-Sherman, Ranen, Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. Print 

—“The Privatization of War Memory in Recent Israeli Cinema,” in Talmon and Peleg, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion. Austin: UT Press, 2011. Print.

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989), pp. 7-24.

Shohat, Ella. Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. London; New York: I.B. Taurus, 2010. Print. 

Stav, Shira. “Nakba and Holocaust: Mechanisms of Comparison and Denial in the Israeli Literary Imagination,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature Facing 1948 (Spring/Summer 2012), pp. 85-98. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Verhaege, Paul. Does the woman exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine. New York: Other Press, 1999. Print.  

Yosef, Raz. The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema, UK, Routledge: Taylor and Francis, 2011. Print. 

—“War Fantasies: Memory, Trauma, and Ethics in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 9, No. 3 November 2010, p. 316. Print.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————

[1]Verhaege, Paul. Does the woman exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine(New York: Other Press, 1999), pp. 11.

[2]Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 29. 

[3]Yosef, Raz. The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema(UK, Routledge: Taylor and Francis, 2011). 

[4]Stav, Shira. “Nakba and Holocaust: Mechanisms of Comparison and Denial in the Israeli Literary Imagination,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature Facing 1948 (Spring/Summer 2012), pp. 96. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

[5]

[6]Yosef, Raz. The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema(UK, Routledge: Taylor and Francis, 2011. Print), pp. 315. 

[7]Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989), pp. 7-24.

[8]Munk, Yael. “From National Heroes to Postnational Witnesses: A Reconstruction of Israeli Soldiers’ Cinematic Narratives as Witnesses of History,” in Harris, Rachel S. and Omer-Sherman, Ranen, Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), pp. 314. 

[9]Munk unintentionally alludes to this distinction when he labels as ‘diasporic’ the ‘atemporal’ aesthetics of Waltz with Bashir (Munk 2011, 97).Yes, perhaps: but this does not amount to a ‘decline’ in memory or the ‘absence’ of a nation: it points rather to a particular place within ‘memory’without which the nation does not exist. The incorporation of the ‘atemporal’ is essential to the act of nation-building: there is no ‘nation’ without ‘diaspora.’ 

[10]Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1977). 

[11]Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 33. 

[12]Waltz with Bashir. Israel, Germany, France: Sony Pictures Classics, 2009.

[13]Shohat, Ella. ​Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation​, (London; New York: I.B. Taurus, 2010).