When Battleship Potemkin made its appearance in 1925, a film critic of the German newspaper Berliner Tageblatt wrote - 'This is not a picture, it is a reality.' Eisenstein steered the form of the film to transpire beyond the realms of the accepted reality of the screen. Ironically, the 'stylized' depiction of blood-soaked devastation made the spectator feel that the film, and thus the spectacle of war itself, has never appeared so 'real'. Impression of reality in cinema undergoes several treatments to 'create the real', and the claim to authenticity is one met with utmost suspicion. The closing minutes of Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman's animated war memoir, rekindles the question of depiction in the similar vein as the film exorcises the horrors of conflict and mayhem.
The last two minutes of the film are not static images or photographs, but footages shot during the aftermath of Sabra and Shatila massacre of September 1982. The cinematic cosmos that the spectator had occupied so far suddenly crashes into reality populated with hordes of woman wailing in the streets, mourning in high-pitched ululations. The camera sneaks from behind the phalanx who walk through a lane lined with debris and corpses. The scenes cut to close-ups of the bereaved, who now face the camera and with flailing arms and uncontrollable bodily gestures evoke their pain, angst, loss and suffering.
The actual footage is a tumultuous departure from the animated documentary mode of recollection and rebuilding collective narratives. The fantastical telling impressioned as recognizable reality (via commendable tehniques of animation) is now in conflict with an inalienable starkness that shrouds the conscience as fever-dream. The previous eighty-eight minute universe, which could probably be dismissed by a sceptical assessor as figments of post-traumatic minds trying to grapple with tyrant psychosis, nows stands dazed how reality has reconstructed itself to be the better depiction. It tells the tale better, and the viewer is horrified beyond the pale. Words require no translation, the palettes needs no adherence to color tone, and severed bodies are not antiseptic images fit for general consumption.
The film is a statement of conscience-call, conundrums of memory, and the myths of factical interpretations. It is borne out of the sense of partition from crimes done and shaking off the yoke of guilt - the personal act of absolution. Yet it hearkens trauma for reconstruction, creating a domino-effect on the lives of the army-brethren. Each of the protagonist's friends narrate their associations - secure life gossiping on the couches teleport to rag-tag beaches or forests where men gun down RPG-trotting teenager in tune with piano - which are set-piece formal, almost insular to the calamity they had inflicted upon themselves and others decades ago. The blood spilled have calmed their own to the point of being passive narrators. The listlessness with which the passive feet floats in the dead of the ochre-dripped night is reflective in the manner in which the protagonist wishes to recuperate of the dissonances of perception. It almost clouds us, the phantasmagorical events get an envelope of animatic treatment, dissonant audio landscape, only to the point of empathizing for the memory that fails to take shape.
But what about the memory the rings loud with its authentic viscerality; the one that needs no virtual re-creation, storyboards and story-arcs. A strip from reality delivers 'an instrument of ballistics'. It speaks of the maker's anxiety in no unambiguous terms - the utterances of the women take no shape of the spoken and translated dialogues, but rather the primordial cry rings true of its purpose. The viewer makes note to the rude awakening, to the sights and sounds that fill the frame. Subtitles do not appear, because there cannot probably be any voice in which cinema can let herself speak, rather than her own - her own quivers in her own sounds and somatic resonances of her language. If the film is symptomatic of the repentance depicted via animation, the end is a reminder that reality is a keen note-taker, recording faithfully, with unrepentant indexicality. The image of the wailing woman remains fixated on the spectator's path of denouement, sans syntactical ease via mode of annotation. Reading images of war-reality is an act of insurmountable comprehension.
References:
Closely Watched Films - An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Techniques. Marilyn Fabe. University of California Press, 2004.
The last two minutes of the film are not static images or photographs, but footages shot during the aftermath of Sabra and Shatila massacre of September 1982. The cinematic cosmos that the spectator had occupied so far suddenly crashes into reality populated with hordes of woman wailing in the streets, mourning in high-pitched ululations. The camera sneaks from behind the phalanx who walk through a lane lined with debris and corpses. The scenes cut to close-ups of the bereaved, who now face the camera and with flailing arms and uncontrollable bodily gestures evoke their pain, angst, loss and suffering.
The actual footage is a tumultuous departure from the animated documentary mode of recollection and rebuilding collective narratives. The fantastical telling impressioned as recognizable reality (via commendable tehniques of animation) is now in conflict with an inalienable starkness that shrouds the conscience as fever-dream. The previous eighty-eight minute universe, which could probably be dismissed by a sceptical assessor as figments of post-traumatic minds trying to grapple with tyrant psychosis, nows stands dazed how reality has reconstructed itself to be the better depiction. It tells the tale better, and the viewer is horrified beyond the pale. Words require no translation, the palettes needs no adherence to color tone, and severed bodies are not antiseptic images fit for general consumption.
The film is a statement of conscience-call, conundrums of memory, and the myths of factical interpretations. It is borne out of the sense of partition from crimes done and shaking off the yoke of guilt - the personal act of absolution. Yet it hearkens trauma for reconstruction, creating a domino-effect on the lives of the army-brethren. Each of the protagonist's friends narrate their associations - secure life gossiping on the couches teleport to rag-tag beaches or forests where men gun down RPG-trotting teenager in tune with piano - which are set-piece formal, almost insular to the calamity they had inflicted upon themselves and others decades ago. The blood spilled have calmed their own to the point of being passive narrators. The listlessness with which the passive feet floats in the dead of the ochre-dripped night is reflective in the manner in which the protagonist wishes to recuperate of the dissonances of perception. It almost clouds us, the phantasmagorical events get an envelope of animatic treatment, dissonant audio landscape, only to the point of empathizing for the memory that fails to take shape.
But what about the memory the rings loud with its authentic viscerality; the one that needs no virtual re-creation, storyboards and story-arcs. A strip from reality delivers 'an instrument of ballistics'. It speaks of the maker's anxiety in no unambiguous terms - the utterances of the women take no shape of the spoken and translated dialogues, but rather the primordial cry rings true of its purpose. The viewer makes note to the rude awakening, to the sights and sounds that fill the frame. Subtitles do not appear, because there cannot probably be any voice in which cinema can let herself speak, rather than her own - her own quivers in her own sounds and somatic resonances of her language. If the film is symptomatic of the repentance depicted via animation, the end is a reminder that reality is a keen note-taker, recording faithfully, with unrepentant indexicality. The image of the wailing woman remains fixated on the spectator's path of denouement, sans syntactical ease via mode of annotation. Reading images of war-reality is an act of insurmountable comprehension.
References:
Closely Watched Films - An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Techniques. Marilyn Fabe. University of California Press, 2004.
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