Valse Avec Bachir

Un beau coffret avec reproductions de planches en papier glacé.
Film édifiant qui figure dans la programmation des dispositifs d’éducation à l’image Lycéens et apprentis au Cinéma.
À voir et à revoir pour tout ce qui est révélé au sujet de la mémoire et du processus d’enfouissement des souvenirs.
À voir aussi pour comprendre le massacre de Sabra et Chatila
À voir enfin pour ceux qui ont vécu intensément la culture musicale et cinématographique des années 80′.

Awesome Movie!!!!!!!!!!!

An amazing award-winning documentary. One of the best that I have seen. The animation is superb – the artists re-create the individual mimicry of each person with uncanny realism, it is not Disney. It’s a very reflective documentary, most of it is made up of conversations or discussions or reminiscences, not action. It’s very personal and therefore powerful. The story is about the director, who was in the Israeli-Lebanon War in 1982 on the Israeli side and witnessed the Shatila camp massacres. He has forgotten about the incident – it’s not clear why, maybe suppressed memories – but years later a conversation with a friend forces him to rediscover and face his memories. He does this by traveling to find and talk to his army comrades from the past to find out what they remember and what really happened. Overall, I thought this was visually stunning and the personal stories are powerful. It really makes you feel how futile and scary war is for young men. And how absurd and surreal. It is done in a thoughtful, not a sensational kind of way. It is not a typical action movie or anything like that. I would recommend watching this with teenagers as a way to teach them about the psychological consequences of war. It is also good additional material if you are reading any history books on the 1982 conflict.

Had anyone suggested that animation could explore the complexities of memory, i would have scoffed. This film goes far beyond memory as it explores not just the horrors of war but the long-term consequences of war on a soldier’s psyche. The opening dream scene of the vicious pack of dogs running through the streets is as frightening as only a recurring nightmare can be and its animation makes it brutally vivid. This is a film about the innocence of young soldiers and the repressed memories of one, now older, attempting to piece together his participation in Israel’s earlier attack on Lebanon. It’s a film that explores the terrible cost of war on the israeli soldiers involved in the attack but also, and most powerful, the terrible violence inflicted on the inhabitants of the Palestinian camps in Beirut as Israeli troops watched from the city’s rooftops nearby. Especially telling was the director’s decision to forgo animation at the end, letting the final desperate blood-soaked footage speak for itself. A brilliant and important work of art that transcends any archived historical document.

I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anything quite like WALTZ WITH BASHIR before. It’s animated, but it’s also a documentary which recounts director Ari Folman’s attempt to reclaim long-suppressed memories of his involvement in the Lebanon War. The animation-documentary combination is an odd one, but nevertheless it works extraordinarily well with what the filmmakers seemed to be going for here. Although it mostly deals with firsthand war experiences, the larger theme is the subjective and fragile nature of memory, particularly of the traumatic and painful variety. I don’t really want to get into any specifics because to do so would spoil the impact. All I’ll say is that this film builds rather slowly as different people are interviewed and details are revealed, and the climax is sure to provoke an emotional reaction. As far as the quality of the film is concerned, the animation is very well-done. The movement is a little odd at times, but this is due to them either using cut-outs or roto-scoping (maybe a combination of both?). I’m fairly certain that the interview scenes were based on actual film footage, but I could be wrong. The sequences in the past are distinguished from the present by having this watercolor-like, washed-out, yellow-tinged and dingy look, while the scenes in the present have more natural-looking color. Back to thematic content, there is also some discussion about dreams and how they relate to memory. And of course, since this film deals with a war (and massacre) issues of morality come up, if in a more subtle way than you might think. What I took away from this is that the Lebanon War (and Palestinian massacre) is something that weighs heavy on the Israeli/Jewish conscience. We as human beings tend to block out things from our memories that we find offensive and overly traumatic, and there probably is some cognitive dissonance between the very real atrocities visited on Jews in the past and the atrocities that they have inflicted, or at least passively observed being inflicted, on others. It should go without saying that this film deals with some very heavy subject matter, but it’s very important that we as human beings are able to confront and deal with all memories, even the ones we’d like to forget.

Interesting approach to storytelling/documentary film.

Worth seeing once.
Wow despite the cartoon-like kind of moving iconography , the topic is very serious and thought provoking.
A breath of fresh air from Israel.
I did not keep the dvd after watching it but gave it to a relative.