// 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)

I also found very interesting information about the film on its web page.

http://waltzwithbashir.com/home.html

I just wanted to add some thoughts to what we discussed in class today, focusing on sound and music, pack mentality metaphors and the reflection to the Holocaust and Nazis, and the aestheics and technique of the ending (which I thought was undeniably powerful)

On sound/music, when we went over the introduction of the film (the dogs running), the musical score definitely leads the viewer to certain emotions and empathy.  If we were to see dogs running without a score, the interpretation of the scene can vary.  I think this goes along with “translation” of text to image, image to film, film to animation, or any combination.  For example, reading a text, say Gravity’s Rainbow, our mind is interpreting what is being read.  We give ourselves an image of Slothrop, of the rocket, of Katje (I imagined to be quite lovely myself).  Anyways, once this text becomes translated to an image, it is both beneficial and a detriment: a plus in that we can personify what was just a thought before, but a detriment in that all other images of the subject are moot, since you are forced upon a certain image.  For example, read a poem, then have the author read it.  It’s quite a difference.

Another note on music, I found it amusing, hilarious, and thoughtful to use songs from the 80’s throughout the film.  The OMD song Enola Gay on the boat, the PiL song This Is No Love Song on the beach, along with the Cake song with a different name.  Not only because I know the songs and enjoyed them, but they presented a seperate “character” along with the documentary: the outsider.  It is expanded when Folman goes back home on leave, but in the fact that nothing has changed, that society for the most part, and excuse my profanity, given a rat’s ass about what is going on.  The usage of pop music in scenes of soldiers not killing, the indifference of the moment, only adds to the detachment of these soldiers, or even humanity as a whole.  If anything, music is the enveloping tie to civilians, soldiers, reality and the unreal dreams, and memories.

The pack mentality discussion we were having ties into the ending I believe, as well as the sense of detachment.  I posted before about the seeming detached movements of animation in this film, that it serves to place the character in the situation, but not in a humane way I don’t believe.  It’s like going through the motions but not believing what is happening is a reality.  The same can be said for pack mentality, doing what you’re told to do, following in the footsteps of another just shooting, not knowing who you’re shooting at, running because everyone else is, et cetera.  But the detachment is not fully accomplished, obvious by Folman’s constant “memory” of the massacre.  It comes rushing back at the very end, without remorse.  The relation from one massacre to the other, the Holocaust, Folman’s Holocaust, and the role reversal of the persecuted and the terrorist.

Watching the film, it felt as if all the actions the characters were taking were very remote, somewhere distant and had no bearing on what is.  It’s probably true of most animations, the kind of escapist behavioralism that is imprinted to us from our childhood.  But the ending turned that on its head: these things happened.  The raw footage drags us back from that kind of indifference, that kind of entertainment genre of film to the terrible reality of our world.

The animation movie, “Waltz with Bushir,” recaps the Lebanese-Israeli War with flashbacks and nightmares of the fearsome memories.  It begins with a pack of twenty-six wild dogs running frantically. The only colors of the background are black, white, and gray, while the dogs’ eyes are yellow, depicting a “ready to kill” look.  By having this color scheme, the dogs seem that much more threatening and aggressive as they violently parade through the streets and growl at the citizens.  This is a recurring dream one of the characters has had for the last two and half years that correlates to a war memory the soldier has.  Twenty years ago, they were sent to the Lebanese villages to look for Palestinians and the character shoots twenty-six dogs to keep them from warning the people of their presence.  He couldn’t bear to kill humans.  It is interesting that this soldier keeps having this same nightmare because of how traumatic his experiences at the war were.

The filmmaker, Pastouchli, has a flashback for the first time after conversing with the other soldier.  As the movie mentions, memory is dynamic; it is alive.  All war experiences can be so intense and distressing that a soldier blocks out his memories from his consciousness.  Pastouchli’s young son asks him whether he has ever shot anyone, but Pastouchli cannot recall.  Most of the soldiers cannot remember anything, specifically discussed in the movie about the massacre.  It is not stored in the characters’ systems, even though both were in Beruit at the time.  He talks to fellow soldiers to try and recall his own story.  He finally admits to his own denial and tries to seek the truth of his involvement in the massacre in Beruit.

I believe the movie depicts how awful and treacherous a war can be.  As Pastouchli begins to recall his past experiences, he remembers the fear invoked.  The soldiers were all clueless and were just teenagers thrown into this war.  As shown when Pastouchli recalls his first day of war.  The soldiers are blazing fire as they arrive on their shore, only to discover they massacred an entire family in a car they shot at.  The soldiers are constantly just shooting everywhere nonstop without looking.  They then had to load and dump the countless dead bodies.  He reveals that the soldiers acted robotically, as if they were not connected to their bodies or actions.  They had not entered the war determined to display valiant and heroic actions or be engrossed by a passion for fighting; these teenagers were terrorized by fear.  Frenkel, another fellow soldier, recalls a child with an RPG that was firing at the other soldiers.  Clearly a child has no business being in the midst of the war with a weapon.  It further depicts how ill-informed the soldiers were, portraying the Israeli government in a negative light.

So i was going through YouTube videos and came across this one. I feel this is so appropriate for our class. It gives a perspective of soldiers in foreign lands from someone that is defenseless just watching it all happen. How they just walk around foreign lands “as if they owned it”, “hungry for human flesh”. I already watched it a few times and decided to share it. After reading S. I think this goes along with the whole view of aggressive soldiers that take what they are told and want .

Its a powerful poem….hope others like it!!

I was not present in class on Tuesday, and just like the previous post, I apologize if I discuss a point that was already raised in class. I know I am a little late, but please bear with me here. My main focus of this post is from pages 123 to 201.

This section of the book focuses on S.’s life after leaving the camp, and her struggles to adjust, since it seemed as though the world was very unfamiliar to her, and that it was a dream from which she may wake up at any moment, and find herself back at the camp. There were many uncertainties for S., especially when it came to her struggle to decide whether she should start life anew and “forget” about her past, or rather to just keep it in a corner from where it never reveals itself, or whether she should continue her life by also carrying the burden of those memories. The following quotes and/or parts of the book show how S. tries to adjust to life after the camp (taking my format from the previous author’s post):

Pg. 123: “What does peace look like?”

This is one of the many questions that come into the minds of the people that leave the camp, who are uncertain about their future. They have seen war so closely, experienced the true horrors of war so strongly, that the prospect of peace is unfathomable to them. These are people who were always surrounded by war, even though S. believed that war was a being separate from her, that it could not touch her. Now, when these people have lost more than can be ever replaced, the question that comes to my mind is, will these people ever feel peace? They are asking what peace looks like because what happened to them will haunt them, because these people cannot just “move on”. War has left a permanent mark on them, whether it be physically from the beatings, emotionally because of the loss of a family member, or psychological because of the constant torment they were in in regards to whether they would ever leave the camp or not.

Rinkeby, Stockholm, March 1993: This section focuses on S. furnishing her new apartment and her giving birth. When it comes to furnishing, S. is at first confused about whether she should buy things that remind her of her life before the camp, to surround herself with memories, or to buy things that will signify a fresh start for her, without a trace of her “previous life.” S. first sees an armchair that reminds her of her grandmother, and as she begins to explore the idea further of being surrounded by memories, she is overwhelmed with how strong they are, and how painful. Her memories come back to her very vividly, so much so that it becomes unbearable for her. It may have been a bit easier for her if she had not known whether her family really was dead, because those memories would have given her hope, which may have made it a bit more bearable for her to remember them and the memories associated with them. In the end, she decides to buy things that do not bring her back to the time before the camp. I think this is because she does not want to think of how happy she used to be before circumstances brought her to this point. Once a person is put in a certain situation, it becomes more unbearable for them to cope with their circumstances when they have seen better times, and remembering those times only tends to make them weaker.

Pg. 195-201: This section focuses on S.’s desire to stay away from the child, her acceptance to it, and her acceptance to her fate. In the beginning, she hesitates so much from touching the child, or to allow herself to ever consider its mother, that she does not even feed it her milk. However, she is a mother after all, so she slowly begins to notice the child, to give it attention. She realizes that the child is not to be blamed, that the child’s fate was sealed even before it came into the world. She weighs her options, the child’s future. The fact that she is even considering how the child’s future might turn out to be is an indication that she is attached to the child whether she allows herself or not, even after putting it up for adoption. The fact that the child has a striking resemblance to S.’s sister seals the deal that she keep him. When she makes that one realization, that is when I realized that the war will stay with her always, and her memories of her life will also remain with her, no matter how much she attempts to forget either. Her acceptance of her child in the end shows that her realities will coexist, whether it be the time before the camp, during the camp, or after it. The child is a combination of her realities, since she cannot forget her family because of its physical features, cannot forget the camp because of the way it was conceived, and will continue to live with it because she is lonely in the end, after all. Eventually, the child’s conception is not what matters to her, but rather its future. With her acceptance of the child, the reader gets the sense that she has accepted and compromised with her situation, and that she is, or will be, finally at peace.

A great author once told me that the first paragraph, no, the first sentence is the most important line of a good book.  I think the same can be said with video media, especially a movie, where the first 5-15 minutes can often hold the most important aspects of the story.  In Waltz With Bashir, the opening of dogs, which I related with the idea of “dogs of war”, instantly hit a chord with me.  The coloring of the landscape also triggered other thoughts, the yellow clouds, yellow often related with death, malaise, etc. The blue buildings which is related with unknowing.  Since I’m focusing on aesthetics for the moment, I’ll comment a bit on the animation style.

The animation at first had me believe that it was rotoscopic, or painting cells of animation over real actors or filming, such as in the remake of Scanners, A Scanner Darkly, but I quickly realized that isn’t the case: it’s too disjointed.  Real actors would not be able to move in such a way, every motion by the characters seem deliberate, every motion of the scenery seems fluid.  The animation style also reminded me of japanese animation, Ghost in the Shell, which revolves around identity and sense of self more than memory, though memory is mentioned throughout that film.  The use of dark shading and field of view depth is also reminiscent of japanese animation, though it adds a dark tone and sense of detachment in Waltz With Bashir.

Going back on the doll-like movements of the characters and how it relates to memory, I think that it is a striking adaptation of how to represent memory.  It’s like frames in film, photos in an album, stitched together to the best ability of your mind.  Just as in the Slavenka Draculic’s S, it’s pieces of time that cannot, or unwillingly, tied together.  Memory is supressed, triggered by certain moments of the present, or simply the denial of what had occured or self-division.  As reference, the sense of olfactory, sense of smell, is the most dominantly tied to memory, but in Waltz With Bashir, it is as though memories of another trigger ones own. 

On a personal note regarding when the protagonist (the filmmaker, cannot remember his name at the moment) tells the “cheap lawyer” about the memory, and his response was that of memory which did not belong to a person, I felt a memory trigger:

I’ve had a memory of my youth, around sixteen, that I had been living in an apartment in Chinatown, which was given to me by a friend to shorten my commute to school.  The apartment had a dull biege color to its walls, one thirteen inch TV, one 27″ TV, three stovetops that did not work while the fourth was way too hot.  The bathroom was a contrasting green with its tiles, and strangely the bed was situated right next to the living room, with none of its sides touching a wall.  There are countless other images of this apartment that I can remember with complete detail, the only problem is that this had never happened, and I cannot remember the address.  In a way, I saw myself in a completely fake memory, but one that was completely real to me.

But I digress.  I feel as if the stories recollected by the soldiers somehow borrow from each other, like they are bleeding into each others collective memory to form some kind of “truth” about the war.  Recurring images such as the ocean, water, travelling, even the fake memory within the memory (the protagonist in the airport, believing that nothing was destroyed, seeing travel times for flights away from Beirut).  It’s a definite blurring of what can be believed, a kind of “untrustworthy narrator” literary technique.

Honestly, I cannot wait to see the rest of this film.

We spoke in class about how everyone was affected emotionally by this book. While normally I would be in the minority of the people who weren’t bothered by the book, this book was something a little different. The ideas of torture, murders, and rape did not affect me, not because they are not terrible things, but rather due to the fact that I knew all along that it was a fictionalized account of real events. I consider the fiction part quite important to how the book didn’t affect me emotionally in that way. Of course, it would be morally wrong to argue that these were not horrible events, I just feel that if it were written as an autobiography, it would have had a different impact, even if the book was inspired by the tales of women that Slavenka Drakulic personally spoke to.

The Diary of Anne Frank comes to mind as an example of this. The diary was also a representation of war from a different perspective than the battlefields but it was more concrete and “real” than this novel. However, dramatized or not, what got to me either way was the idea of murdering new born infants. I have always been partial of the abuse of children, to the point where even hitting for discipline purposes upsets me, so the murder of children was very bothersome.

I personally will never be able to feel the motherly bond between her new born child (as I am lacking certain crucial body parts,) but I know that my mother would never have been able to “get rid” of me the way these parents did. Indeed, while I was fortunately not a child conceived in rape, I was a premature one who doctors might have considered better off letting go, but that option was never taken. I guess that is why I am disgusted by the way these “mothers” were able to so easily get rid of their children. I don’t see how they could go through all the tragedy in the camps and then have the nerve to dispose of their baby. In my opinion these mothers are no better than the soldiers in said camps, they murder just as easily as the soldiers. The ending of the novel was one that I was pleased because although we saw that the baby was born in the first chapter, we got the chance to see that S let the baby live and is at peace with her choice, so whether or not she keeps it is unimportant.

Although I was not in class on Tuesday, I still wanted to put my two cents in on “S.” (forgive me if I touch upon points presented in class, but as I pointed out I was not present).

I want to start out with the quote on pg. 38, the second paragraph starting with “In this place, death is not something remote or foreign…” This really stuck with me. Everyday we see people taking life for granted and we ourselves have also at some point or another. I cannot even imagine how frightening it would be to live in a life where “death is a constant companion”. This truly captures how difficult the lives of these women was.

Next on pg. 73, “S. realises that they too are prisoners without any individuality, without a face.” These women went from having identities and lives. Here came this horrid event and completely tears away any fragment of identity these women possessed. This shows the readers that war not only takes away from the soldiers but also the innocent civilians, they too lose who they are.

pg. 85 “…make-up enabled her to don a mask, she discovered that it was a way to gain power…” This paragraph captures the strength within S., the strength that remained even after the men tried to break her down. She learned that she could not be herself but must learn “what it means to be an actress” (Pg. 84) in order to survive and steal the power. She realized that she is only humiliated as long as she allows the men to humiliate her. She has become a different person.

pg. 132 “is one really utterly deprived of all choice in war?” This question really resonated with me. S. did not kill her child, regardless of what happened to her and the dark feelings she harvested. Again this really shows how she has power, control over the self. She chooses for herself as opposed to allowing war, the abusive soldiers and society chose for her.

This book really shows a strong woman who, regardless of everything she encounters rises on her two feet and makes her own decisions! She does not allow war to consumer her, war does not win.

and those were my two cents!