// War Literature

This is a critique of Ari Folman’s decision to use raw video footage of the massacre at the end:

Little by little, Folman sneaks up on the subject of Sabra and Chatila. Was he there? Right there? A hundred yards away? Three hundred yards away? Or nowhere near? His confusion testifies to the fog of war, or perhaps to the fact that this fog is created as a way of not facing up to war-guilt. Or perhaps it shows the individual’s dissociation from news events, his disoriented, perspectiveless feeling that what he sees on TV had nothing to do with him: history was happening somewhere overhead or behind his back.

Finally, the film puts him right at the scene of the crime, and there is a bold shift from animation to TV news footage. I am not sure quite what to make of this shift, and have an uncomfortable feeling that it is an aesthetic error, and a tacit concession that the animation techniques used until that moment are lacking in seriousness: once the tragedy is directly broached, they must be abandoned. A minor loss of nerve, perhaps. Never mind. This is still an extraordinary film – a military sortie into the past in which both we and Folman are embedded like traumatised reporters.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/21/waltz-with-bashir-folman)