My film course at the university is moving on to documentary-making this week. The text for the week is Ari Folman's animated film, Waltz With Bashir (2008). I missed it when the film was released so it's been good to catch up with it. Controversial at the time and retaining its capacity to unsettle viewers today (if my fellow students at ANU are anything to go by) I'm glad I've seen it now.
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| Walter Benjamin in Paris in 1939 Pic: Gisela Freund |
The reading around the film, especially an article by Ohad Landesman and Roy Bendor (conference presentation on the article can be seen here - beginning at 23:40) offered plenty of food for thought. The article makes a good case for reading the film in complex, interwoven ways - anti-war film, trauma narrative, recollection of lost memories, the flight of a generation of men from the realities of their own pasts, personal and national guilt, and more.
Among other ideas explored through the film and in the article I encountered the notion of the factical, a concept (from Martin Heidegger) I had never met before. Who knew memory could play such tricks on us? Maybe everyone but me. And Walter Benjamin's construct of the dialectal image. What a loss - one of the innumerable - that man's death was as a result of the Fascists of the 1940s.
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