Waltz With Bashir: Showing Culpability Or Not?

Waltz with Bashir: Showing Culpability or Not?

One cannot stop himself from feeling sympathetic towards Ari Folman, the Israeli soldier who is trying to recover his memories of what happened during the Sabra and Shatila massacre in the 1980s. Folman shares this journey of recovering his repressed memories in his Animated-documentary film Waltz with Bashir (2009). When watching the film, one question kept popping in my mind: Why? Why is Folman trying to remember? Why did Folman make this film? Raz Yosef simply answers these questions in his article “War Fantasies: Memory, Trauma, and Ethics in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir” by saying that this film is really just a “hallucinatory quest” into Folman’s repressed memories of the Sabra and Shatila

For example, when asked about his feelings towards the massacre, Folman states in the film’s press-kit: “one thing for sure is that the Christian Phalangist militiamen were fully responsible for the massacre. The Israeli soldiers had nothing to do with it” (Waltz with Bashir). In answering this question, Folman does not only expresses his feelings about the massacre, but also makes sure that the fact that he is not to blame becomes clear to the audience. He brings up the Christian Phalangists to assure the readers that they come first in the blame hierarchy, not him or the Israeli soldiers. “In the film, it is on the shoulders of the Lebanese Phalangists that responsibility for the massacre is unequivocally placed,” Naira Antoun explains the hierarchy of guilt in the film in her article “Film Review: Waltz with Bashir”, “the Israeli soldiers have qualms and do not act on them, the Israeli leadership are told and do nothing, while it is the Phalangists who are depicted as brutal and violent.” (“Film Review”). The hierarchy that Folman creates puts the Phalangists on the top, the Israeli leaders next, and the Israeli soldiers -including Folman- at the bottom. This hierarchy is also shown in a different scene where a new scapegoat is introduced. For the last scene of the film, Folman chooses real footage that shows a woman screaming

But that view ignores the latent meaning of the dream, and only takes it at face value. What I find interesting regarding Folman’s dream, is how different it is from Boaz’s dream. Boaz’s dream in the opening scene of the film shows 26 dogs running and waiting for him under his window. In his article, Yosef points out that Boaz’s dream means that he wants to “forget” and not remember massacring the 26 dogs. (318). I think that Boaz’s main reason of wanting to forget, is the fact that he feels guilty about having to kill 26 dogs during the massacre. In his dream, Boaz sees these dogs, whom he killed, haunting him and waiting for him under his window. The way Boaz is actually there in his dream in the same place as the dogs demonstrates his sense of guilt. In contrast, when interpreting Folman’s portrayal of his only dream of the massacre where he is seen lying peacefully in the middle of the ocean, one can sense the detachment Folman is feeling from this massacre. One can see the flares get lit in the sky while Folman looks at them from a distance like he has nothing to do with them. By repeatedly showing this dream, the viewer forgets that Folman is having the dream because he feels guilty, and instead develops a sense of Folman’s detachment of the