Exercise Bad For Herpes

"Waltz with Bashir," dancing between pain and memory.

Review by Tiziana Favero
In these days of conflict, they see once again involved in the Palestinian Territories and the Gaza Strip Gaza, Israeli tanks, missiles, Kassam, and the search for an enemy to Israel is just a film about the Israeli Lebanese conflict of 1982. "Waltz with Bashir" was released in Italy on January 9 and is a film that everyone should see. Of those who leave the audience seated until the end of the credits, which raise the people in silence. One of those films that brought the audience to reflect on what has been shown, "to learn about what happens around them.
Presented at 'last Cannes Film Festival, winner of six Israeli Oscars and now in competition with Gomorrah, for' the American Oscar foreign language film, "Waltz with Bashir" offers all this. Despite appears as an animated film is set in the documentary genre tracing, using the autobiographical story of its director, the hard reality of conflicts that involved the Lebanon in the early eighties and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
Just listening to the middle of the night in a bar the story of a friend, concerned about a recurring dream, Ari Folman said Israeli records, you realize that you have removed an important part of their lives. He began his research, the dark area that was completely abolished, which had been in 18 years, his experience in 'the Israeli army committed in the first Lebanon war to eradicate the Palestinians from those territories and their missiles that threatened the North Israel. Like a dream that continues throughout the film with the use of innovative technology projects the viewer on a journey through the unconscious, creating a kind of plan is not really between the stage and the dark area that the protagonist tries to investigate all the film.
Once started this quest for truth, enter into its analysis and the analyst during a session Folman talks to a patient who has similar holes in his memory: "They are called dissociative amnesia. This inability to recall important personal information in response to a dramatic event. I might mention the case of an amateur photographer, a patient of mine. In 1983 I asked: 'How did he overcome the first months of the war? ' and he replied: 'Pretending to be a long stay in a theme park. I kept telling myself, look at that beautiful photos can be taken from here, gunfire, mortar fire, dead bodies, wounded, blood '. He watched everything that happened through a camera imaginary, and for a while 'it worked. Then, something happened, as if the camera was broken. He explained that the experience he had become traumatic when suddenly his department had occupied the Hippodrome of Beirut. Carcasses were everywhere in the stables of Arabian horses, and massacred those who were not dead, dying. That scene broke my heart, I said my patient. In war it is normal that men commit atrocities on other men, but what have those poor animals? The vision of those beautiful Arabian horses wounded to death was too much even for him. He had learned to use a mechanism that allowed him to remain outside of what's happening around, but it was enough that it would involve a scene in first person, because he could no longer say 'this is not really happening'. And shortly thereafter, went mad. " It is these that are dissociative amnesia as a thread throughout the film by the Israeli army.
Through the stories of his former comrades forgotten that even reluctant to return him to remember buried nightmares, returns to his youth. The carelessness of youth, of those guys that unprepared, inexperienced, super-armed and with the same face of the terrified soldiers entering today in Gaza, they left in 1982 to the conquest of Lebanon. Reappear as sharp as photographs faded by time but always real, the events of those days of war. The starting point for a long jaunt, including campaigns and days of sun on the beaches of Lebanon. The background music that accompanies them is the same one that sang the first American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam after the same shots that turned into death and despair everywhere pass.
It is through the technique of animated documentary, the film manages to evoke great images because of their cruelty. The desperation of a soldier under sniper fire forced the Palestinians to come out to dance the waltz under the posters of Bashir. The erotic fantasies of another, he imagines to swim on a woman's body while burning it all off. The array of wild dogs chasing a friend of Bashir and seem to those who had had to kill because they did not bark during the maneuvers. Coming
the inevitable truth of the massacre he witnessed helplessly in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. While the Israeli Army entered West Beirut in September 1982, Bashir Gemayel, a young and charismatic Maronite Christian Phalange allies general Israel's newly elected president of Lebanon, was assassinated (still do not know by whom and from which side). Did not wait the reaction of the Falange. Under the incredulous eyes of the Israeli army and powerless and the tacit approval of then defense minister Ariel Sharon, killed and massacred women, children and elderly. It was a genocide that the director unconsciously associated with the Hebrew. Three days and three thousand innocent victims, the same that appear in the final sequence of the film. A few minutes of footage, this time no longer a real cartoon, the population of what he found once back in the camps, death, debris, bodies torn and suffering innocent. Although little
known was one of the most shameful pages of history and tragic Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The news shocked the world, including Israel, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, so unanimous protest forced the government to set up a commission of inquiry. Sharon was found guilty of not doing enough to stop a massacre, since he had been informed. Declared unfit to command had to resign with the prohibition to hold that office again. In '96 he became foreign minister in 2001 and became prime minister.
The film plays on some recurring themes when it comes to genocide and war, but the real skill of the director lies in the fact that the same words can and should be valid for all peoples, as the Jewish Palestine. MEMORY, what is lost, which is suppressed, that you want to forget, but the only thing that binds us to our past and we can project while avoiding the errors in the future. Innocence of a child who just wants to play in the snow with his fake gun, a beautiful horse run free, a carefree man to walk on their own land. WAR, even though the same man should have learned respect and the right to be "a man who dies for a yes or a no." In this age of technology, the illusion of being able to control everything with a remote control, media wars and massacres on the agenda, the idea that machines are superprecise to drop bombs. We forget too often that however the war is still done by men. Forgetting more often these men, unconscious of their guilt. Sins so heavy that removes the memory. We are so perfect a machine to remove exactly the things you do not want to remember.