Ari Folman
Valzer con Bashir

In this rainy vacation week that offers little to the imagination and to my ravenous and infinite desire for mountain hikes, I am accustomed to spending the early morning hours this way. In the same ritual manner. With a steaming coffee in hand to begin the careful reading of the daily newspaper. I love the smell of paper, I enjoy feeling the rustling of the pages under my fingertips. When I find a nice passage, I reread it and reward myself with a tiny satisfying sip: as if it had the power to make me remember it over time. In the end, I come across a short and weighty article about the "j’è accuse" of South African Judge Goldstone directed towards the recent "Operation Cast Lead" which anticipates proceedings at the Hague.

I am forcefully reminded of certain scenes from the animated film “Waltz with Bashir” from the past winter. Folman's film speaks of blurred autobiographical memories; memories unconsciously erased or at least buried by those who were sent to Lebanon in the first week of June 1982, by then Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon in response to the FATH's attempt to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in Great Britain. Of those who had thus seen and then scribbled the memory of the Beirut of those days. The director was there, but only after speaking about it twenty years later with a friend obsessed by a recurring nightmare that starts the dance, did he realize that he didn't have the correct prescription glasses: he must admit that what remains is a faded overview in which everything is mixed.

A documentary film, full of interviews and images could have been a way to narrate, to try to make memories return and resurface. But eventually, Ari Folman must have thought that the use of deliberately sparse animation might more incisively underline that attempt at reconstruction. The human mind, he questions, can it really have the power to erase, to render undesired things shapeless and nebulous? With the help of a psychoanalyst, he continues the search for truth: the only televised images punctuate with the mild yet firm rhythm of an accusation, the end credits as I leave the theater satisfied. My personal conclusion is that “Waltz with Bashir” should not be understood solely as the need to clarify the first war in Lebanon and consequently the dreadful reprisal by the Christian-Maronite phalanges on the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps that occurred with Israeli support.

This short film is even more ambitious and takes on the colossal task of self-accusing those within the Israeli state who believe that the blame is unequivocal. The protagonist, the enemy to fight is denialism. In fact, denialism or reductionism, both inward and outward, continues to be tied to the existence of this state created on paper after the Second World War. With "Waltz with Bashir" it seems to me that Folman tries to take a pair of sharp scissors. Only by taking on the mammoth responsibility of actions like these, from all sides, can one very utopistically attempt to approach what he does not even dare to call peace, but a generic improvement.

For these reasons, I believe that "Waltz with Bashir" is a dense, courageous, and stimulating film. I recommend it to you.

ilfreddo