Total recall

FILM: Ari Folman had no memory of his time as an Israeli soldier in the 1980s

FILM:Ari Folman had no memory of his time as an Israeli soldier in the 1980s. Only when he began creating an animated film about it did his dark war memories resurface. Gemma Tiptonlearns about the making of the stunning Waltz With Bashir

WHEN ISRAELI film-maker Ari Folman realised that he was missing memories from his experiences as a soldier during the first Lebanon War of the early 1980s, he set about trying to discover the truth of what he had forgotten, and why. The result is Waltz With Bashir, a film that has been described as the first feature-length animated documentary.

How does one go about filming ideas of memory, both lost and recovered? How do you make a movie about the mind-buried horrors of atrocities that you have not only witnessed, but perhaps even participated in? And how do you present them to an audience in such a way as to avoid the traps of sentimentality and sensationalism?

For Folman, the answer lay in animation, and the art director he chose was David Polonsky. Waltz With Bashiris about Folman's quest for his past, as seen through Polonsky's vision.

READ MORE

The structure of the film is based on actual interviews made with Folman's former army comrades, interspersed with scenes of memory and fantasy, and the end result came about through conversation and collaboration.

"Ari was aiming for maximum artistic impact to be expressed as much as possible," Polonsky says. "He was always saying 'bigger, brighter, more contrast, more drama'. And I was always trying to be as accurate as possible, to pull back."

It is in the fantasy and memory sequences that the dynamic between the two changed, as Polonsky's job was to try to create the images that Folman didn't realise he remembered. "There were a couple of times when Ari said 'yes, it looked exactly like that'. And it was uncanny at times."

Polonsky describes a scene in the film where teenage soldiers load bodies into bags under arc lights in the middle of nowhere. He drew the scene as "very stylized, almost very religious. But it turned out to be exactly what it looked like, and people came up to us and said 'yes, that's what it was like'. Maybe people remember it like that, even though it hadn't been just like that, but because it had been iconic?"

This is an idea dealt with early on in the film, where Folman's "personal shrink", Ori Sivan, talks to his friend about memory and the tricks it plays. "Memory is dynamic; it's alive," Sivan says, describing a psychological experiment in which volunteers, shown images of themselves as children, doctored to appear in a fairground they had never visited, 'remembered' the event. He also talks about the "human mechanism [that] prevents us from entering dark places".

It is to these dark places that Waltzinevitably leads, through the trauma of young soldiers driven by circumstances and their commanders, into nightmare situations, where ideas of ethics, morality, right and wrong become lost.

The culmination of the film is the massacres by the Christian Phalangist militia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Palestine, which were a direct response to the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, president of Lebanon. From images of the soldiers playing ball on the beach, to scenes of ambush and combat, to madness disguised as heroics, to their final inadvertent complicity in the massacre - Waltz With Bashirshows how easily it could happen.

"It's been received pretty well in Israel," says Polonsky. "It has managed to skip the usual right and left wing debate. I think the movie strikes a chord mostly with people who actually went to that war. At a screening there'll be one or two guys in their 40s who come up and start talking, and you realise this is the first time they're talking about it. Ari's amnesia is the rule. Not just because of buried memories about atrocious things, but because this is something we're not supposed to talk about."

Polonsky is now turning Waltz With Bashirinto a graphic novel, though he insists that graphic novels were not the inspiration for the film's look and feel. Neither did he look at Persepolis, the 2007 animated film based on Marjane Satrapi's story of growing up in Iran.

"In retrospect, it looks more like the stuff that's coming out of Japan, but it went that way on its natural tack. I was a serious kid in school, and I have been drawing as long as I can remember. I liked the German Expressionists, like Otto Dix, they way they tried to be objective and expressive at the same time. I liked illustration, a little bit of fine art."

Talk of fine art makes me think of Goya and his Disasters of Warseries, begun in 1810, which came out of the Peninsula War. One in the series, Yo lo vi (I saw it), connects directly to the question that is repeated in Waltz With Bashiras news of the massacre emerges. "Did you see it?" is the refrain, as if those asking the question are trying to deny the truth for as long as possible.

"I looked at Goya's war drawings," confirms Polonsky. "And I knew that it was important not to be carried away with the aesthetics of violence, because it's very easy to do a pretty picture of bodies."

The idea of seeing and showing comes at the climax of the film; Folman remembers his role was firing flares into the sky from the roof of a nearby building, illuminating that which he couldn't himself see.

The end of the film is not animation but documentary footage, taken in the Sabra and Shatila camps just after the massacre.

"It was one of the hardest things," says Polonsky, "to create a language and make it political, and make people forget that they're seeing animation. That's why the footage at the end is so crucial. It says: 'this happened'; this is factual. But the simple effect of changing the medium at the end creates this shock.

"If you just showed this footage, it's jaded - we've seen so many corpses. We either look away, or it doesn't register. But when you've been kind of 'softened' by animation for 80 minutes, you see it with fresh eyes.

"It's not the artistic innovation of this drama that is important, there is a moral issue and a political issue too."

• Waltz With Bashiropens on November 21

Roamin' Polonsky

The film's art director, David Polonsky, was born in Kiev, and came to Israel with his family at the age of eight, just before the war in Lebanon broke out.

"It was a difficult move," he remembers. "It's partly the reason I don't remember anything about the war, because I was having my private little war against the kids at school."

Like most Israelis, Polonsky did his National Service in the army. "It wasn't that traumatic for me because I wasn't in combat, but you give three of your better years. And it's a unifying thing - everyone's been through it. It used to be regarded as a good thing, and it's still a common ground for many in Israel. I'm not that sure if it's a good thing. I wouldn't go so far as to say we don't need the army, I just can't say anything simple about it."

Polonsky has hitherto been known mainly as an editorial cartoonist and illustrator of books. He previously worked with Ari Folman in a more light-hearted vein, in an Israeli TV series, The Material That Love Is Made Of. Folman and Polonsky are collaborating on another film project, this time science fiction.