Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir shows the destructive beauty of war
In the mid1980s, just after Ari Folman had left the Israeli Army, he set off on a round-the-world backpacking adventure. Two weeks into his trip of a lifetime, Folman realised that travelling wasn’t for him, so he holed up in a Southeast Asian guest house where, for a year, he consumed the stories of fellow guests and turned them into his own fictional adventures to be sent home in letters to friends.
Repetition has worn the rough edges off this anecdote, which Folman tells to illustrate the fascination with story that attracted him to film-making. But it does rather neatly show the approach he has to the medium – personal, introspective and driven by an eloquent visual imagination.
Folman’s latest film, Waltz with Bashir, was one of the undisputed critical hits of Cannes 2008. When I meet him at the Sarajevo Film Festival he is in the middle of a punishing global tour of festivals – so much for the young ex-soldier who decided he didn’t like travelling. He says that he’s particularly looking forward to coming to London with the film. “Some of the happiest times of my childhood were spent in Belsize Park,” he says. “It’s my second home.”
Waltz With Bashir follows Folman’s attempt to piece together the events surrounding the massacre of Palestinian refugees during the first Lebanon war in the early Eighties, using his own shattered memories as a soldier during the conflict and interviews with others who where there. It was billed as the first feature-length animated documentary, but in fact it’s a haunting, occasionally nightmarish vision that defies easy categorisation.
A memoir without memories perhaps? A biography of a war crime? What is certain is that no film since Apocalypse Now has more effectively captured the surreal, lucid dream strangeness of war, nor its destructive beauty. With the film, Folman asks questions of himself, his fellow soldiers and his country, but doesn’t necessarily find answers. The focus, he explains, is more philosophical than political...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Repetition has worn the rough edges off this anecdote, which Folman tells to illustrate the fascination with story that attracted him to film-making. But it does rather neatly show the approach he has to the medium – personal, introspective and driven by an eloquent visual imagination.
Folman’s latest film, Waltz with Bashir, was one of the undisputed critical hits of Cannes 2008. When I meet him at the Sarajevo Film Festival he is in the middle of a punishing global tour of festivals – so much for the young ex-soldier who decided he didn’t like travelling. He says that he’s particularly looking forward to coming to London with the film. “Some of the happiest times of my childhood were spent in Belsize Park,” he says. “It’s my second home.”
Waltz With Bashir follows Folman’s attempt to piece together the events surrounding the massacre of Palestinian refugees during the first Lebanon war in the early Eighties, using his own shattered memories as a soldier during the conflict and interviews with others who where there. It was billed as the first feature-length animated documentary, but in fact it’s a haunting, occasionally nightmarish vision that defies easy categorisation.
A memoir without memories perhaps? A biography of a war crime? What is certain is that no film since Apocalypse Now has more effectively captured the surreal, lucid dream strangeness of war, nor its destructive beauty. With the film, Folman asks questions of himself, his fellow soldiers and his country, but doesn’t necessarily find answers. The focus, he explains, is more philosophical than political...