WALTZ WITH BASHIR -DOCUMENTARY ANIMATION
Waltz with Bashir is an animated autobiographical documentary by Israeli Filmmaker Ari Folman. The film’s focus is on Mr. Folman’s coming to terms with his memories and the trauma of his experiences during the Lebanon war of 1982, in particular the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. As Folman sets out on his journey to restore these memories, he interviews several people: soldiers, friends, a therapist, a journalist and men who served with the director of the military to gather their recollections. The saturated color and rotoscope-like animation are compelling, but the star of the documentary is the music and the way in which it is used. With the exception of a few of composer Max Richter’s scores, much of the music is unlike the sweeping emotional orchestrations that accompany the story in Spirited Away, but instead but it is used conceptually. This diverse soundtrack, that includes a techno soundtrack with a heavy beat, mixed with classical music, orchestral leitmotifs and 1980s punk sound aids the viewer in making both narrative connections and historical connections. The filmmaker uses music to make parallels with repeated use of same piece of music. According to Michel Chion, “music in cinema is a spatio-temporal apparatus because it allows the film to link to different places and times, to the future and the past” (Music in Cinema 205).
The film combines surreal and acidic and pastel toned images with a robust soundscape that illustrates the PTSD and forgotten memories of an Israeli soldier. In several scenes rock music is juxtaposed with images of war and it almost appears to be like a music video and is unexpected within the narrative especially since it is a documentary. Since it is a documentary Ari Folman had to create the diegetic sounds that he imagined might be there, in particular he created a world of dream sequences. He had to use sound and music to create connections between scenes and to tell both the historical narrative but also the psychological narrative.
“A good deal of Waltz with Bashir’s extratextual, rhetorical heavy lifting comes from its soundtrack. The film employs an instrumental score by Max Richter, original ballads, …pop songs, anachronistic covers of pop songs and appropriately some classical waltzes” (Devin Harner, Memory, Metatextuality and Music of War).
Scene One:
For the first three minutes of the film, we have no dialog, only soundscape, a mixture of both diegetic sound effects and non-diegetic music. The camera pans back on a desolate street and menacing music. The credits roll over this scene, introducing the viewer to the fear and nightmare that this film might be about. Mad dogs appear from nowhere. The camera moves backwards, away from the dogs as they come forward which is very disorienting and foreshadows the idea that there is no escape. It is as if we are in the middle of a horror film. He is joined by an army of dogs chasing something. Someone is being hunted or haunted. The dogs are like an army of dead souls, eyes yellow, snarling. The soundscape is a combination of growling dogs, paws frantically hitting the ground and electronic sounding drum beats. The drumbeats are very fast paced and get louder as the scene progresses. The effect is to make the audience feel uneasy. It heightens the tension. We know the film is about the trauma of war and it is as if the filmmaker is showing us at the beginning how it feels as if there is no escape from the chaos. Memory, nightmare or dream? Cut to Ari Folman and his friend Boaz speaking in a bar, recounting the memory and nightmare and clearly the memory of his time in the war left him with trauma and possibly perpetrator guilt, which he passes on to Ari and awakens it in him. The bass-heavy beat in this scene, is repeated more than once in the film, connecting the viewers to the thread of trauma that runs through the film. This beat will be repeated later in the film, at moments when Folman may be experiencing PTSD symptoms. Rasmus Greiner calls this “reflective listening” and refers to Michel Chion when he discusses this scene, “Reflective listening is similar to what Michel Chion calls Semantic Listening in that it arouses spectators interest in decoding the film sound as if it were a signal”. Greiner believes that reflective listening creates connections and associations. This beat is heard again when Folman is taking a taxi after he has interviewed another friend. The techno-beats again suggest a post traumatic moment. According to Greiner, “The sound design adds an intersequential level to the mindscape” (30).
Scene Two:
Early on in the film, Folman has a flashback of the war - his first in twenty years. The clip below shows the first aural experience the viewer has listening to Max Richter’s score The Haunted Ocean. Folman wants you to be moved by the score. He keeps the diegetic sounds to a minimum so the viewers can feel the memories coming back with him. Before the orchestration begins, the viewer focuses on the ambient sounds of the rain and ocean. This is another example of what Michel Chion refers to as reduced listening. Rasmus Greiner refers to text by Butzmann and Martin, “It often rains during moments of high emotional intensity. Sound designers create an analogy between the release of emotional inhibition and the opening of the heavens”. The sound of a turbulent sea is often symbolic of a traumatic or emotional moment. The sound designers use the ideas of reduced listening to force the viewers to block out anything unimportant and then the haunting score by Max Richter takes over compounding the feelings.
The Haunted Ocean soundtrack repeats several times during the film, creating references and connections between scenes. The score becomes a leitmotif that accompanies his memories washing back on him.
Scene Three:
The narrator, Carmi, imagines in a quasi-dream that he is transported to war on a “Love Boat” with 1980s techno pop music and partying against blue backdrop, silhouettes, nameless soldiers. The soldiers are excited and happy to be together, foreshadowing that they will soon be a part, loss of innocence. The soundtrack: Enola Gay is an anti-war song by the english electronic band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The title of the song references a Boeing Superfortress bomber that is named after the pilot’s mother. It was the first plane to drop an atomic bomb in warfare in Hiroshima, Japan. The lyrics to the song are: “you should have stayed home yesterday…the games you play they’re going tend in more than tears some day…it shouldn’t have to end this way…it shouldn’t fade our dreams away…” The bleak lyrics, combined with the synth-pop sound serve as both warning and call to play. According to Devin Harner,”Implicit sex is juxtaposed against explicit violence. The narrator recounts, ‘I saw my best friends go up in flames right before my eyes, as the “love boat” is bombed from the air’…the viewer realizes that the vessel was not a “love boat” but a regular warship…What we see as remembered in error, represents a teenagers conflating of war, sex and adolescent adventure” (18-19). The fact that the lyrics are about the Enola Gay offers the viewer a parallel reference to the cold war.
The film derives power from the extent to which the front is haunted by the cultural capital of the home front, and this haunting is made possible, in part, through Folman’s strategic employment of pop music. - (Devin Harner, Metatextuality)
Scene Four:
The following scene is effective in blurring memory and reality, and terror from comradery. It is almost like a music video. It follows a scene in which Ari Folman’s friend describes avoiding a fight and floating out to sea. When he emerges from the sea, he feels guilt that he wasn’t there for his soldiers. One soldier is feeling guilt for not being able to save his fellow soldiers from death. In a surreal moment, He walks by the ocean at night and fades from view. It fades into daylight and his fellow soldier is walking in the other direction and his gun surrealistically turns into a guitar. The camera speeds up and it is almost like a music video. Guitar music is played over tanks and soldiers and the viewer is offered a montage of moments of war and moments of leisure. There are sounds of war mixed with the culture of youth. There are surfers juxtaposed with grenades hitting the sea. Shots of war are juxtaposed with them sitting leisurely seaside. There is a blurred line between the two as it is hard to see the brutal war of violence only till it becomes a memory that haunts you. The music in this scene is an example of anempathetic music since the scene at first appears funny and light and something one might see on music television even with the aforementioned violence, but the lyrics of Zeev Tene’s Beirut say “Every day, I have bombed Sidon. Among the smoky mushroom clouds, in the first daylight,I could have all returned inside a coffin…I got out from there alive, but I also could have died”.
This song is a cover of the U.S. band Cake’s I Bombed Korea. Writer Devin Harner suggests that the relationship between the two songs encourages the viewer to connect Beirut and Korea symbolically and make connections not just to the atrocities of war, but also to “past US Imperialistic endeavors”(24). Essentially, Ari Folman’s choice of music is to get across his point of view and force a connection. He is using music to lead his audience to a particular understanding. According to Harner, “Even as Waltz with bashir self-indulgently probes the limits of an individual's memory, it explores collective memory of other conflicts that transcends both its direct references to the holocaust and to World War II…In its latent use of specific pop culture moments in cold war era history, Waltz With Bashir critiques the war in Lebanon and comments on the fluidity of memory, and in doing so , it achieves much more in the way of universality” (Harner, 24,25).
Scene Five
The scene below follows “I bombed Beirut” and the tone and music are a dramatic change. It is another example of anempathetic music as the viewer sees soldiers stalking their enemies with classical music as a backdrop. The music is Arioso from J.S. Bach. There are no diegetic sounds, no footsteps, no gunshots. The scene is balletic. The juxtaposition of the previous scene with its rock and roll followed by this one with classical causes the viewer to use their cognitive skills to determine what the filmmaker is trying to imply and makes you question whether the memories are imagined or real.
Scene Six:
The film gets its title from a sequence referred to as the Junction Scene. Lebanon’s Chiristian President, Bashir Gemayel has been assassinated. Angered by this, Christian phalangists went on a rampage killing Palestinians. While soldiers shoot, Chopin’s Minute Waltz plays. Soldier Frenkel heads into the middle, holding his rifle as if it is a dance partner, and dances while he shoots and is being shot at. Here we have another example of anempathetic music. The sounds of the shrapnel and gunshots become subtle background sounds. We are offered a close up of a poster of Bashir that is filled with bullets. There is a disconnect between reality and music. It confuses the truth of what we are witnessing. We question what side of the conflict we are viewing from and wonder if the characters are considering personal responsibility. War is a dance, a waltz. The viewer questions which partner is taking the lead.
Michel Chion’s theories provide a valuable lens through which to view and appreciate the intricate sound design and its relationship with the visual storytelling in “Waltz with Bashir”. The film’s audiovisual elements work together to create a haunting and thought-provoking exploration of memory and trauma. The sound design plays a crucial role in conveying the intense psychological emotions. The frequent use of anempathetic sound underscores the narrative’s gravity and the protagonists internal struggle. The soundtracks in this film create connections not only between sequences, but within history. It determines the mood of the film, assists with comprehension and enables reflection. Waltz with Bashir is a wonderful example of what Michel Chion would refer to as the “audio-visual contract”. The viewer is considering both sound and image to be participating in the same entity; The stylistically unique animations paired with a rich anempaethic soundtrack, mixed with a few empathetic leitmotifs, contrasted with visuals that recall 1980s music television videos and video games gives the viewer a lot to contemplate.
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