Folman, Ari. Waltz with Bashir.

Ari Folman’s 2008 animated, Hebrew-language documentary Waltz with Bashir has been cited (Morag) as exemplary of perpetrator trauma in cinema. The film is semi-autobiographical, and centers around Folman’s search to recover lost memories of parts of his time as an IDF (Israeli) soldier during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon from 1982-1984, of which his recollection is clouded by trauma. 

Shaping the film’s exploration of perpetrator trauma is its formal innovation. Waltz with Bashir has been described as an animated documentary or “documentary-animation” in which “animated footage based on realistic documentary materials (such as interviews) is combined with imaginative animation, giving the film an overall texture of animation while including ‘authentic’ interview materials” (Rastegar 64). As Kamran Rastegar points out in his work on the film, this allows for less-representational and more imaginative representations of memory and trauma’s effects on memory while maintaining “a legitimizing link to conventional documentary as rooted in testimony and actuality” (64).

Both these documentary and more imaginative modes are used to depict the psychological aftermath of the war for IDF soldiers, including the piecing together of lost memories of the war. In particular, Ari (the film’s protagonist, also the filmmaker) cannot recall the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which civilians, mostly Palestinian refugees, were murdered by a militia connected to a Lebanese political party with IDF assistance, including by Ari and his fellow soldiers as he eventually discovers. 

The film focuses on Ari’s conversations and interviews with fellow soldiers who were there, a psychologist, a military higher-up, and a reporter. Interspersed with those discussions are depictions of the events in question, and even newsreel footage of the massacre, which as Katrina Schlunke points out, as the only non-animated sequence in the film, has the effect of turning the viewer into a witness (950). Another key sequence is that which gives the film its name: one of Ari’s fellow soldiers, instead of seeking cover from sniper fire, remains in the middle of a junction and fires in all directions, against a backdrop of, on walls around the junction, posters of assassinated Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel. Emphasizing the surreality of that soldier’s ‘dance’ with Bashir, a waltz plays in the soundtrack.

By now a classic in Perpetrator Studies, Waltz with Bashir has been analyzed by scholars who look at aesthetic questions of representing memory, especially traumatic memory (Schlunke), the ethics around distinctions between personal and cultural memory (Rastegar), and national trauma as perpetrator trauma (Morag). It remains a valuable teaching tool for examining these and other topics. 

Cited: 

Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. I.B. Tauris & Co., 2013

Rastegar, Kamran. “‘Sawwaru Waynkum?” Human Rights and Social Trauma in ‘Waltz with Bashir.’” College Literature, vol. 40, no. 3, 2013, pp. 60–80.

Schlunke, Katrina. “Animated Documentary and the Scene of Death: Experiencing Waltz with Bashir.” Vol. 110, no. 4, 2011, pp. 949–962., doi:10.1215/00382876-1382339.

Author of this entry: Hannah Jakobsen

Folman, Ari, director. Waltz with Bashir. Sony Pictures Classics, 2008.