Dec
27
2008
waltz with bashir, minuet with orfeo
The first time I saw Waltz with Bashir, I fell asleep. No reflection on the film, more a reflection on my irregular lifestyle. Seeing it the second time I was again struck by the opening credits, a masterpiece of scene-setting. But to wind back a bit ….
Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary telling the story of the director Ari Folman’s search to recover his memories of his own involvement in the 1982 massacres of Palestinians in the Shatila and Chabra refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut.
This film is remarkable in many ways. But most obviously, documentaries are not typically animated. In fact, the only other full-length animated documentary I can think of is Persepolis, also released here this year. Waltz with Bashir doesn’t feel at all like a documentary; it feels simply like gripping story-telling. And the form the story-telling takes is very soon quite irrelevant.
I’m reminded of watching a performance of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice in a puppet theatre in Prague. The theatre held an audience of 40 or so and the procenium arch of the stage was about 3 feet high. The set consisted of painted sheets of cardboard. Quite contrary to my expectations, the magic of the puppetry, the music and the drama drew me in in just a few minutes.
