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BOOKS
Airport to nowhere
Waltz With Bashir: A Lebanon War Story by Ari Folman and David
Polonsky
Introduction by Tom Engelhardt
A pack of ravenous dogs, a nightmare, a visit from a war-haunted friend, this
was how film director Ari Folman's period as an Israeli "grunt" in the 1982
invasion of Lebanon first returned to him. As a 19-year-old Israeli soldier,
Folman was on duty in Beirut during the notorious massacres in the Palestinian
refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. But when he began to search for his own
memories of that war, what he found instead was a puzzling, disturbing blank.
Tentatively setting off in pursuit of those missing memories, horrors buried
for almost a quarter of a century, he also launched
himself on a path that would lead to his award-winning, Oscar-nominated
animated film, Waltz with Bashir, and an accompanying graphic memoir of
the same title, developed in tandem with it.
Just a week ago, the animated documentary film was given its first underground
screening in Lebanon - not far, in fact, from Hezbollah headquarters in
southern Beirut - though the film is officially banned in that country. It has
also been screened in Palestinian Ramallah and is reportedly soon to be shown
in the Arab Gulf states. It has already won six Israeli Academy Awards, best
foreign film at the Golden Globes, and is now nominated for an Oscar as best
foreign film.
At this moment, when the Israeli assault on Gaza has ended in catastrophic
destruction and death, director Folman's remarkable voyage - he calls it a "bad
acid trip" - into the oblivion of war trauma and the horrific recent history of
the Middle East is as stunning, moving, and unnerving an experience as anything
you'll see this year, or perhaps any year.
A no less remarkable graphic memoir, Waltz with Bashir, was developed in
tandem with the film. It will be in your bookstores in a couple of weeks. Not
surprisingly, the book and film have some of the impact that the first "graphic
novel," Art Spiegelman's MAUS, had when it came out in 1986, and that
assessment comes from the fellow - me, to be exact - who published MAUS
back then.
The single-best piece on Waltz with Bashir and its relevance to the
recent invasion of Gaza was written by Gary Kamiya of Salon.com. He concludes:
"Of course, Israel's moral culpability for the 1982 massacre [in Sabra and
Shatila] is not the same as its moral responsibility for the civilians killed
in the current war. But there are painful similarities. Sooner or later the
patriotic war fervor will fade, and Israelis will realize that their leaders
sent them to kill hundreds of innocent people for nothing. And perhaps in 2036,
some haunted filmmaker will release Waltz With Hamas."
Like the film, this is a book that must be experienced. Unfortunately, given
recent events, it couldn't be more of the moment. When asked by a Washington
Post reporter how it feels to have his film released in the US, "just as Israel
is at war again, this time in Gaza," Folman responded: "There is a constant
conflict, you know, so it's always happening again. This film is always being
updated. It is always relevant to current events."
In this, the first part of the book, Folman is told the nightmare about the
vicious dogs by his friend, Boaz, and begins having flashbacks, inexplicably
illuminated by himself rising naked from the sea to step into a war-torn Beirut
night. He sets off to Holland to track down an old army buddy for answers, and
when we leave, his fellow soldier describes the grim landing on a beach in
Lebanon in the early days of the invasion.
Part 2 of this exclusive excerpt from Waltz with Bashir takes up after
Folman has managed to reconstruct his first days of the war. In the stunning,
unnerving pages that follow, he begins to restore to memory his arrival in
Beirut and the events that will ultimately lead him to the dark, shattering
center of what he has forgotten: the horror of the massacre of Palestinians in
Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story by Ari Folman and David Polonsky.
Copyright: 2009 by Ari Folman/Bridgit Folman Films Gang. Published by
arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an Imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
All rights reserved.
(To order the book, click
here.)
To view Part 1 as it appeared on TomDispatch.com, click
here.
To view Part 2 as it appeared on TomDispatch.com, click
here.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of
The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He
also edited
The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso,
2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative
history of the mad Bush years.
(Used by permission of Tomdispatch)
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