Waltz with Bashir is an “animated documentary”
about the 1982 blood-letting in Lebanon when Israel invaded, the assassination
of the Christian Phalangist President Bashir Gemayel, and the subsequent
massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The film is
up for an Oscar as best foreign language film; oddly, it was entered into the
competition by Israel.
I haven’t seen it, and may not. The animation, judging from only a couple
pictures reproduced with a review in the Denver
Post, runs a gamut of techniques, some of which, like those being used in
tv commercials lately, are all color and no line, obviously “doctored” versions
of film of real people.
The reviewer, Lisa Kennedy, was moved by what she saw,
but I wonder about the genre here. “Animated documentary.” Animation is always,
one way or another, a hand-wrought version of a reality, and as such, it can
re-shape that reality to suit the “animator’s” vision. A documentary, on the
other hand, takes its place in the pantheon of film making as reportage,
filming actual happenings, usually as they happen. This is the stark truth of
reality; animation is the re-making of reality. Offhand — again, without having
seen the product — it seems to me the terms are mutually exclusive. Or else the
documentary part will be subsumed by the animated part. I realize that even raw
“documentary” is subject to the film maker’s interpretive manipulation of what
he has filmed. But still, it’s not all fiction, not all hand-made. Take a look,
though, and tell me what you think.
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