The Past Present:
Reenacting, Animating, and Framing Trauma in Recent
Documentary Film
Charley Boerman Student ID: 11363282
Thesis rMA Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr. B. Noordenbos
Second reader: Dr. D. Duindam/Dr. H. Stuit June 14 2018
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I want to thank my supervisor Dr. Boris Noordenbos, who never failed to help me regain confidence in this project, encouraged me to develop my own thoughts and whose enthusiasm, hard work, and feedback made this thesis better than I thought it could be. I have greatly enjoyed working together, and I’m happy this was not the last time.
Without my friends in what we lovingly call ‘the cult of analysis’, this process would have been more harsh and incomprehensible than it has been. I’m glad we went through this together, alone. I especially want to thank Tamara Breugelmans and Sabrina Stallone. Their kindness has been an unmissable source of support, and their work-ethic pushes me to do better.
In the final weeks of writing, I found shelter with my mother Jacqueline and Arno. Thank you for feeding, encouraging and distracting me, and letting me come and go as I pleased. This home was the warmth and shelter I needed to run the final stretch.
Finally, there is one who will never read my work again, but without whom I would not have thrown myself into learning with as much enthusiasm as I have.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations 3
Introduction 4
Chapter 1: Remediation and a Haunting Presence in HhhH 13
History Remediated 17
A Specter Haunts the Present 25
Chapter 2: Redemptive Reenactment: Waltz with Bashir and Animated Memory 30
Evoking the Past 32
Therapeutic Repetition 40
Chapter 3: Patchwork: Reading The Missing Image as an Eclectic Frame 48
Constructing an Eclectic Frame 50
Beyond a Eurocentric Trauma Aesthetic 59
Conclusion 63
List of Illustrations
Figs. 1 – 8 Screenshot, Himmlers hersenen heten Heydrich. Pages 20-25
Figs. 9 – 15 Screenshot, Waltz with Bashir. Pages 39-44
“Mastery is again the issue, but this time the method of obtaining mastery is totally different: not mastery through knowledge but mastery by admitting affect. This is by no means a passive opening up but an active countering of the closure brought about by narrative mastery.” - Ernst van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust” “Put simply, history does not repeat itself, except in mediated transformations such as memory, representation, reenactment, fantasy, categories that coil around each other in complex patterns.” - Bill Nichols, “Documentary Reenactment”
Introduction
This thesis will explore the aesthetic strategies employed by recent documentary films concerned with atrocious histories. Whilst exploring different historical moments, from different perspectives (a historiographer, perpetrator, and victim respectively) these documentaries problematize the straightforward storytelling of history by employing
performative representational strategies. My analysis will take place within the larger context of the performative turn, which signals, partly based on the work of John Austin and later Judith Butler amongst others, the understanding of utterances and human behavior as being both descriptive and performative. When performative, an action or utterance creates, rather than describes, reality (Bruzzi 186). Stella Bruzzi relocated Austin’s analysis of constative and performative utterances to documentary and argued that “the film itself is necessarily performative because it is given meaning by the interaction between performance and reality” (186). The documentaries I will analyze foreground their own active engagement with the histories they attempt to portray and embrace their performativity to self-reflexively question their position and access to these histories. They do so each in their own way, yet all employ reenactment, play, and imagination in varying degrees to convey a ‘felt knowledge’ of, rather than cognitive mastery over, these events.
In the Dutch docu-series Himmlers hersenen heten Heydrich (Van Broehoven 2017),1 based on the book by Laurent Binet about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a plethora of media and characters is used to re-tell a history beyond grasp. In Waltz with Bashir
(Folman 2008) director Ari Folman retraces his memories of his involvement in the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war through animation, but ends with a shot/counter-shot and eyeline match of himself looking at live action footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The Missing
Picture (Panh 2013) combines archival, found and propaganda footage with clay figurines
and dioramas to act out the director’s experiences of his time spent in a Khmer Rouge concentration camp. At stake in my close-reading of these documentaries then is how the different elements of their performativity, most importantly reenactment but also play, evocation and imagination, portrays their self-reflexive struggle with the (im)possibility of representing these historical episodes.
My interest in performativity and self-reflexivity in documentary was first sparked by Joshua Oppenheimer’s by now infamous documentary The Act of Killing (2012). In this film-within-a-film Oppenheimer asked several perpetrators of the Indonesian mass-killings of ’65-‘66 to reenact their crimes in a film genre of their choosing. The result is a haunting display of costumes and violence. Remarkable in the documentary is the focus on perpetrators rather than victims of violence, and the use of semi-historical and dramatic reenactment to learn about the past. The film made me question the ways in which documentaries, but also art dealing with a violent past can use imagination and play to get close to, communicate, and convey the trauma and memory of that violence without appropriating or creating a spectacle of that history.2
1 From now on referred to as HhhH. In English the title translates to ‘Himmler’s brain called Heydrich’. 2 Dominick LaCapra argues that certain presentations of or engagement with trauma can lead to ‘vicarious or surrogate victimage’ and obfuscate the difference between the by-stander or someone who did not experience the trauma and the victim (71). This can lead to the ideological use of trauma, or of trauma as ‘symbolic capital’. He proposes to engage with trauma through ‘emphatic unsettlement’. This unsettlement allows for an affective and emphatic engagement with trauma, but does not glorify or appropriate that experience. Rather, the unsettlement
The Act of Killing is not alone in its experimental approach to the representation of
violence and trauma. Ernst van Alphen, in his essay Playing the Holocaust, analyzes several contemporary artworks that use play, puppets, and other forms of toys to counter the dogmatic rules of Holocaust representation and instead attempt to enact a ‘felt knowledge’ of the event. Van Alphen argues that hegemonic Holocaust representation is marked by a concern with pedagogy and education, and is often represented through historical discourses such as testimony, documentary, memoir and monument (“Playing” 71). He continues to argue that the Holocaust is taught in order to have mastery, based on the assumption that if the past is known, the future can be controlled (“Playing” 72). However, since the Holocaust is first and foremost a history of trauma, it cannot be mastered (ibid.). Trauma, conceptualized as
unrepresentable due to its non-linear and non-discursive nature, defies narration. Van Alphen poses that when it comes to teaching the Holocaust (and perhaps by extension, other histories of trauma), pedagogical mastery might not be the most suitable.3 This contradiction in
Holocaust pedagogy, namely that it is presented through discourses which base themselves in evidence and fact aiming to master the past, whilst at the same time this past is often said to be inexplicable, can lead to disinterest or boredom with the subject (“Playing” 72). Rather, play and its open-endedness could lend itself better to reaching a certain understanding, based on affect, of the events, as opposed to ‘learnable knowledge’ or narrative.
I find Van Alphen’s analysis of Holocaust education and art intriguing, as it breaks
should prohibit an ‘utopic’ or glorified experience of the trauma of the other. See LaCapra, especially chapter 2, for a more in-depth development of his critique and concept.
3 As Craps, and Visser, amongst others, note, it is a problem in trauma studies that it is Eurocentric, relies on Western aesthetics for its understanding of the (im)possibilities of representation and bases itself on the Holocaust as the hegemonic paradigm of trauma. I recognize that I am partly guilty of this trend, as I too transpose Van Alphen’s Holocaust based argument to other genocides, thereby running the risk of obfuscating particularities and not viewing a catastrophe like the Cambodian genocide on its own, but only through the lens of the Holocaust. I feel it is legitimate to rely on Van Alphen however, as my first object is about the Holocaust, and my second object bases itself on Holocaust based memory and trauma studies in its strategies of
representation. Finally, as I will argue, The Missing Picture employs and rejects Eurocentric strategies of representation to constructs its own eclectic frame to approach the Cambodian genocide. I will come back to the necessity of decolonial trauma theory in the conclusion of this thesis. For an overview of decolonial trauma
with the solemnity with which trauma is often approached, and conceptualizes play and imagination (fiction, in a way) as potentially educative, also when dealing with historical (non-fiction, real life) events. In this thesis I want to transpose this reading to one of the historical discourses he mentioned: documentary. While documentary has many different forms, shapes and genres, it is often used as a pedagogical tool – in schools, public
broadcasting, and even court.4 This is due to the documentary’s status as being able to make ‘truth claims’ about the world.
The traditional epistemological framework of documentary treats it as a representation of reality. This representational paradigm, as Ilona Hongisto calls it, presumes that the
documentary treats a reality which is separate from itself, and can do so truthfully by the indexical status of its audio and visual material (15). This framework is based on John
Grierson’s often used description of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” (qtd. in Hongisto 14). For Grierson documentary is the recording of “natural materials” (ibid.) which are, after their mechanical (re)production, ‘treated creatively’. The index, as part of the semiotics developed by Charles Peirce, constitutes a sign that is linked to reality by causality or proximity (ibid.). This means that the photographic image, or moving image in the case of documentary film, contains an imprint of reality, presumably without interference. André Bazin described the unique status of photography, and by extension film (as the sequence of photographic frames) as such: “[t]he objective nature of photography confers on it [the image] a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making [like painting]” (7-8). The
mechanical reproduction of the image suggests an absence of human interference with what is in the frame.
Such an understanding of the images documentary is made up of, lends it not only its representational status, but also that of truth-bearing. The expectation of documentary for the
4 The allied forces developed a documentary about Nazi concentration camps to show at the Nuremberg tribunal as evidence, see Douglas.
audience then becomes, for documentary theorist Bill Nichols, an “oscillation between the recognition of historical reality and the recognition of a representation about it” (Introduction 36). He has called this initial expectation a ‘discourse of sobriety’, or the presentation of being able to speak directly about ‘social and historical reality’ (ibid.). More so than by virtue of its use of indexical images, Nichols posits that this expectation is supported by rhetoric strategies that present the documentary as truth-bearing. He distinguishes between several modes of documentary that employ such rhetoric in a variety of ways, the most well-known being the expository mode (Introduction 31). The expository mode relies heavily on archival (indexical) footage, expert opinions, an omniscient voice-over and a clear rhetoric and
argumentative structure (ibid.). It constructs a complete narrative and presents itself as master over the history it discusses, much like the pedagogical mastery Van Alphen describes.
Although it is still a popular pedagogical tool, the conception of documentary images as an indexical ‘mirror with a memory’ has long been contested. Linda Williams, in her analysis of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, amongst other films, proposed to view documentary not as caught between the dichotomy of fiction or non-fiction, but as a self-reflexive “set of strategies designed to choose from among a horizon of relative and contingent truths” (14). In contrast to the expository mode and the presentation of history contained in a master
narrative, these films offer the past not as totalizable and “unitary representable truths” but as fragmented, akin to a palimpsest (Williams 15). Particularly those dealing with an
‘inaccessible traumatic past’ are irretrievable through a single ‘mirror with a memory’, and require a ‘layer upon layer’ palimpsestic approach to their memory (ibid.).
In her analysis of The Act of Killing, Heather McIntosh posits that documentaries concerned with trauma contain many contradictions – as trauma is elusive, and documentary aims to represent (3). Much like the narrative mastery Van Alphen discusses, the
trauma, or to claim mastery over them. The Act of Killing does not claim mastery over its subject, but brings the past into the present through playful yet heart-wrenching and dramatic reenactments, omitting the narration of facts and voice-over, archival footage and experts. Like the toy art Van Alphen describes, the documentary is self-reflexive and conscious of its (im)possibility of representing its subject matter, but embraces this limitation in an attempt to approach the matter regardless. It attempts not to teach its audience about the numbers, dates and facts of the mass-killings, but provides a more affective and potentially long-lasting reflection on power, perpetratorship and fantasy. Restaging the violence exerted by the protagonists seems first at odds with documentary, as the drama and scripting counteract the sobriety of documentary and its expectation of direct access to the past through indexical images. Yet this strategy is remarkably suitable as an approach to trauma. Although trauma is unrepresentable (and these reenactments are very graphic), the logic of its non-linearity, or
Nachträglichkeit as Freud called it,5 functions as the partly involuntary recurrence of a past
experience in the present – much like how a reenactment is the past coming into the present.
The Act of Killing is not the only documentary in recent history that foregoes the
conservative method of historical storytelling in favor of a more performative, experimental and open-ended approach to trauma and memory through the use of reenactment. In this thesis I will analyze the ways in which HhhH, Waltz with Bashir, and The Missing Picture each forego a position of mastery over the history they tell and instead foreground their own involvement and incompletion through a self-conscious remediation of their histories, and the disparate materials (archival and fictional, indexical and imagined) they incorporate.6 All three documentaries are self-reflexive in Williams’ sense: they present contingent truths, and
5 Nachträglichkeit translates more or less to ‘belatedness’ in English. I will explain Freud’s conception of trauma more thoroughly in chapter two.
6 Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney describe that remediation is a concept introduced by David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin to draw attention to the ways in which new media reuse older media. Erll and Rigney use the concept in cultural memory studies to analyze how “all representations of the past draw on available media technologies, on existent media products, on patterns of representation and medial aesthetics” (4). See, Erll and Rigney 1-14.
would certainly fit in Nichols’ mode of the reflexive documentary as they foreground their own position as a representation (Introduction 31).
However, beyond their self-reflexive positions, their performative use of reenactment evokes something experiential and affective beyond reflection. I chose to close read these three documentaries in particular because they, each in their own way, question the
possibilities of their medium to represent these violent histories. In questioning this they take on performative rather than documentarist strategies, and propose affective learning rather can cognitive mastery to engage with their subject. The contrast between archival footage on the one hand, and live-action footage with figurines, animation, and reenactment on the other emphasizes the materiality of these media and the importance of storytelling when
approaching these histories.
In the first chapter I will close read Himmlers hersenen heten Heydrich, in which the book of the same name by Laurent Binet is adapted into a docu-series to discuss the 1942 assassination of high ranking Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich. I will read the use of
characters, incorporation of the author, various media and forms of reenactment in the series in relation to conventional modes of representing history in documentary. Through Hayden White’s notion of historiography as embedded in narrative much like prose, Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney’s use of the concept of remediation, and Bill Nichols’ analysis of reenactment in documentary film, I will posit that HhhH makes known its own involvement in the
construction of a particular representation of historical facts, and emphasizes the necessity of storytelling in this process. The return of Heydrich, almost as ghost, in the present resists narrative closure, and inhibits the relegation of these events to history.
In the second chapter I will explore difficulties in telling a history not from the
perspective of a historiographer, but that of a traumatized perpetrator. Waltz with Bashir is the animated reenactment of its director’s recovered memories of the 1982 war between Israel
and Lebanon. Relying on Annebelle Honess Roe’s analysis of the materiality of animation in documentary, Sigmund Freud’s notion of the repetition-compulsion and Ernst van Alphen’s concept of trauma as a failed experience, I will read Waltz with Bashir as reenacting the symptomatic logic of trauma. Using animation to bring the past into the present, it evokes an affective understanding of this history in the viewer. However, the sudden cut to archival footage of the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre creates an ambiguous ending to the film and its possibility of closure.
In the third and last chapter I will further explore the use of archival footage in my close reading of The Missing Picture. Whereas the previous documentary seems to endow the indexical image with the truth-status previously undone by animation, in The Missing Picture the silence of photographs and documentary images, their impossibility to convey sense, knowledge or meaning, are at the forefront of its investigation. Director Rithy Panh reenacts his time spent in Khmer Rouge concentration and forced labor camps through elaborate dioramas and figurines. Using Frank van Vree’s concept of ‘absent memories’ and its
emphasis on the importance of social frames, I will read The Missing Picture as the attempt to construct an eclectic frame that both works with and against existing discourses to create a social and discursive space for the experience of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. This will further allow me to question the validity of a Eurocentric and Holocaust-based notions of trauma and its representation for other, particularly non-Western histories of trauma.
These three documentaries deal with ‘traumatic memory’, a misnomer as Mieke Bal said, since the traumatic cannot be narrated and therefore not become part of narrative memory (viii). The question running through all three chapters then is how can we represent, narrate, make known and convey a history that defies focalization? How can you pay tribute to the incomprehensibility of this violence whilst choosing to reenact it anyway? Because this is what these documentaries do, they attempt whilst knowing they will fail. Doing so against
the backdrop of pedagogical history representation in education and documentary creates wonderful and confusing objects. As Van Alphen described, this poses a two-fold problem, as the supposed mastery of history is not always the best pedagogical tool for teaching history and secondly, histories of trauma cannot be mastered. The documentaries analyzed here bypass such attempts at mastery and instead operate near histories that will always remain elusive.
Chapter 1: Remediation and a Haunting Presence in HhhH.
In 2017 the Dutch public broadcasting network VPRO and director Roel van Broekhoven released a new docu-series named Himmlers hersenen heten Heydrich. The series is based on the identically named book published in 2010 by Laurent Binet and chronicles Operation Anthropoid: the 1942 assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovakian resistance fighters Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš under the supervision of the British Special Operations Executive. The seven episodes give an overview of Heydrich’s highly influential role in the Third Reich as Reichsprotektor, inventor of the Kristallnacht and Einzatsgruppen, and architect and executor of the Final Solution. The historical docu-series employs, much like the book it is based on, many (for its genre) unconventional storytelling methods, such as three voice-overs (one for the author Binet who is incorporated in the docu-series, one for Heydrich, and one for Gabčík and Kubiš), an actor playing Heydrich in contemporary Germany and Prague, and film footage of (fictionalized) reconstructions of Operation Anthropoid. The events are not laid out linearly, but characters are told to ‘wait their turn’, and the series jumps between various temporal modes – at times comparing the present with the past – and juxtaposes various media and footage with an obviously staged reenactment and haunting presence of “Heydrich” in the present.
As a historical docu-series HhhH breaks with what Bill Nichols has dubbed the expository mode of documentary, often used for documentaries on historical events. The expository mode uses a single voice-over to interpret (often archival) footage and creates the impression of a well-supported perspective and objectivity (Nichols, Introduction 169). Epistemologically the expository mode can be grouped within the representational paradigm of documentary, which assumes that there is a reality ‘out there’ which can be represented. Nichols’ reflexive mode however, questions the possibility of documentary to represent
reality as such, and emphasizes the negotiation between documentary and viewer (Introduction 194). This is in sharp contrast to the more conventional understanding of documentary as a truth-bearing medium, which derives this status from its indexical relationship to reality (Plantinga 105-107). In HhhH it is not only the storytelling methods that are unconventional, but also its use of reenactment and non-indexical imagery that break with the stylistic rules of the more conventional expository and historical documentary.
In this chapter I want to question what the performative storytelling methods of HhhH do to the truth-bearing status of this documentary, and to the possibility of representing, conveying and teaching a history of trauma. How does the documentary embed itself in the construction of a reality? What does this do to the traditional pedagogical methods employed in documentary? While the series is rich in examples to analyze, I have chosen to focus on the presence of the author Binet in the series, the use of feature film footage and other media to visualize key events and emphasize the remediation of memory, and finally the reenactment of Reinhard Heydrich. After further developing my theoretical framework and outlining the epistemological assumptions of the expository and reflexive mode, I will close-read the three above mentioned examples of storytelling in HhhH and analyze what they do to the
epistemological foundation of the docu-series. I will argue that they foreground the importance of storytelling for historiography, and question the accessibility of history not only through time and space, but also as unmediated by previous representations. The series is highly reflexive and engages with the problems of representation, emphasizing the process of remediation in both history and memory formation.
As I briefly outlined in the introduction to this thesis, the traditional epistemological framework of documentary treats it as a representation of reality. The separation between reality and documentary, and documentary’s access to this reality relies, rhetorically, on the
indexical status of its audio and visual material. This framework is based on John Grierson’s much-used description of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” (qtd. in Hongisto 14). For Grierson, documentary is the recording of ‘natural materials’ which are, after their mechanical production, ‘treated creatively’ (ibid.).
Such a straightforward understanding of documentary and reality has long been contested. Stella Bruzzi argues that “documentaries are a negotiation between film-maker and reality” (186). This means that the director cannot have unmediated access to reality, but that this is always negated through the act of filmmaking itself. Bruzzi therefore calls
documentaries performative, as they are not constative and merely observational towards reality, but in their process create this reality (ibid.). She distinguishes between documentaries that have performative content, such as the drag ball dancers in Paris is Burning (1990), and documentaries that are performative in form. Performative documentaries call attention to the construction of reality in their form, for example by showing the director’s interaction with subjects (Bruzzi 188). Nichols too, by distinguishing six modes of documentary, recognizes that documentaries employ different rhetoric strategies and have differing understandings of their epistemological grounding and relationship to ‘the world out there’. Furthermore, he questions Grierson’s distinction between ‘natural materials’ on the one hand, and ‘creative treatment’ on the other. Nichols claims that “our access to historical reality may only be by means of representation” (qtd. in Hongisto 14). He precludes that Grierson’s ‘natural materials’ provide film with a direct link to reality, and instead postulates our access to ‘the world out there’ is always mediated and negated through indirect representation (ibid.).
The representational paradigm and Bruzzi’s performative documentaries are primarily concerned with what happens in front of the camera, and what is captured on film. While Bruzzi focusses on the performative form of documentaries, as do I, she centers her argument
around the engagement of directors with their subjects on screen.7In the case of
documentaries about historical events, particularly atrocious histories, the object of study is out of reach not only in Bruzzi’s sense (namely as being mediated through the act of
filmmaking), but also through time and, often, space. This raises questions concerning how to represent history in documentary. In the representational paradigm it is through indexical images that documentaries obtain their reference to reality and status as truth-bearing. For documentaries about historical events then, the film is dependent on a collection of documents and archival audio-visual footage, perhaps interviews with people specialized in the topic. However, these documents are fragmented and in themselves do not say much: they need to be given meaning.
Similar to the history of documentary, historiography was traditionally conceptualized as a study of facts that speak for themselves. Historian Hayden White has argued, however, that the study and telling of history is embedded in narratological strategies that give meaning to history. White explains that he “treat[s] the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse” (ix). Akin to the critique on the representational paradigm of documentary, White argues that the historian’s interpretation, framing, and narration give meaning to facts. Paula Rabinowitz argues that historical documentaries employ similar (and cinematic specific) strategies of narratology to both present a version of history to its viewer and convince the audience of its truth-bearing status (119). Historical documentaries then seem to be in a double bind, as film only has indirect access to reality and historiography gives history a specific meaning through its strategies of retelling.
7 Bruzzi bases her argument on documentaries by Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield, amongst others. These are films in which the director actively engages with their subjects on screen, and foreground rather than hide the involvement of a film crew in the construction of the film and the reality as portrayed on screen. In the films I analyze the directors are not physically present and oftentimes nor are the subjects, leading the documentaries to perform their engagement differently – as I argue throughout this thesis. For more on Bruzzi’s analysis of
What I have sketched here is not a theoretical framework that will answer certain questions, but one that actually problematizes the historical documentary’s epistemological foundations, relationship to the ‘world out there’, and possibilities for representation. Often, historical documentaries follow the rhetoric strategies at outlined by Nichols under his
‘expository mode’. He explains that this mode “assembles fragments of a historical world into a more rhetorical frame” (Introduction 167). It thus frames various materials to make a case. Through voice-of-God narration the commentary is presented as separate from the images provided and organizes and contextualizes them (ibid. 168). This mode serves to convey a perspective and argument on (historical) events, but often fails to address the epistemological hazards I have sketched above. This sense of ‘wholeness’, as Rabinowitz calls it, constructed through cinematic conventions (134), can be compared to Van Alphen’s notion of ‘mastery’ over history in the pedagogical teaching of past events (“Playing” 72). Both aim to present their narrative as complete and learnable. Bearing in mind the problems with documentary and historiography, I will now look at the storytelling methods employed in HhhH and how they reflect on documentary making, historiography, and the possibility of representation. I will look at the presence of the author, the abundant use of non-historical materials, and the impersonation of Heydrich in the present.
History Remediated
The opening sequence of HhhH, which is more or less the same for each of the seven episodes, introduces the four characters, their respective voice-overs, and the event around which the series revolves: the author Laurent Binet, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš,8 (actor) Reinhard Heydrich, and Operation Anthropoid. Introducing a historical docu-series as having characters and telling a story (albeit based on facts) is unusual, as characters imply fiction. It
8 While Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš are two different people and characters, they share a voice-over and are presented as a duo throughout the series.
is not uncommon for documentaries to employ narrative strategies mostly associated with fiction films, but usually this is done more covertly (Nichols, Introduction xi). Presenting the subjects as characters is a trope that Binet used in his book and can thus be seen as the series staying faithful to its source text. Instead of merely visualizing what is in the book however, the series actively employs the author as a character as well. This creates an interesting dynamic as the author is introduced as the storyteller, in a way the master of the story to be told, but also as a subject in a new story that includes the author. The extradiegetic level, the author, is collapsed into the intradiegetic level of the documentary, while new extradiegetic narrators are added. The opening sequence immediately frames that which will unfold on screen as being told and having been told already. In this sense, the series, while asserting that this story is ‘based on facts’ throughout the episodes, foregrounds the involvement of the storyteller in the construction of its narrative and rejects its position as impartial and objective to these ‘facts’.
While the series partly chronicles Binet’s written story, it also engages with new materials, witnesses, places, and subjects. The author becomes part of a two-fold
investigation: the investigation into his process of writing, and the additional material collected in the documentary. The author for example visits Heydrich’s mansion in Prague and speaks to one of the maids, and an episode centered around perpetrators and their children features the author walking his newborn in the park. The episode that centers on the execution of Operation Anthropoid discusses the difficulty the author had with writing those scenes, and highlights the place where he wrote them. As in Bruzzi’s performative documentaries the author is placed in active interaction with his story, and he himself becomes part of the story. It locates the author as subject, with a specific historical and geographical location, and insinuates that Binet as author is not separate from the reality he wants to represent. Rather,
he is both actively engaged in its creation and in turn is himself created by other narrative agents, such as the documentary’s director.
The position of the author is emphasized by certain shots, such as the author looking at photographs of the Babi Yar massacre on his laptop in a cafe (see fig. 1). By inviting the viewer to observe the author looking at photograph, it both becomes clear how removed the author is from the events (he is looking at grainy black and white photographs on a modern computer in a café) and how far removed the viewer is (probably looking from a television or computer, one step further removed than the author). The scene also emphasizes the need to interpret and narrate historical documents as they themselves are silent.9
Incorporating the author as a character is a reflexive move that aims to make the viewer more aware of the construction of reality unfolding in front of her. Nichols describes the aim of the reflexive mode of documentary as such: “Instead of seeing through
documentaries to the world beyond them, reflexive documentaries ask us to see documentary for what it is: a construct or representation” (Introduction 194). The author, and by extension the documentarist, becomes an engaged storyteller who is constructing a representation in front of the viewer.
By incorporating the author as a character, HhhH makes an epistemological claim concerning the accessibility of a reality ‘out there’. This spills over into other aspects of the series. In figure 2 the author looks at Salon Kitty (1976), an Italian sexploitation film based on Heydrich’s wire-tapped brothel used to extract information from members of the Nazi Party and foreign diplomats. Binet reflects on Heydrich and the brothel on camera while the film is playing. This creates an interesting dialogue between the author, other representations of the events chronicled in his book, and the documentary itself as another mediation of these
9 Rabinowitz quotes Martha Rosler who said that “photographs are dumb”, asserting that their meaning is constructed through techniques such as montage, contextualization, sound, and narrative (120-121). It echoes Susan Sontag’s analysis of war photography in Regarding the Pain of Others, where she argues that although photographs might show that war is hell, they need a narrative to supply them with more meaning (80). I will elaborate on this point in my second chapter, when I close-read the final scene in Waltz with Bashir.
events. This interaction of different media again emphasizes the indirect relationship the author and documentary have to the events (by placing a fictionalized representation in between) but also places the documentary itself in relation to other representations. Salon
Kitty represents one version of Heydrich’s brothel, while Binet’s is another. By making the
author into a character of the documentary, and by placing the author in a (visual)
conversation with other representations of the same historical facts, the docu-series questions the position of author (and by extension director) as objective and removed from the story being told.
Fig. 1. Laurent Binet looking at images of the Babi Yar massacre on his laptop.
It seems that what there is to work with, both for the author and the director, are other mediations. This is radically opposed to the understanding of documentary as having an indexical link to the reality ‘out there’. HhhH not only puts the author in dialogue with various media, but also uses montage and editing to visualize certain key events, such as the execution of Operation Anthropoid. Heydrich was meant to be shot as his car slowed down in a bent, but Gabčík’s Sten gun failed leading Kubiš to throw a grenade underneath the car. As can be seen in figures 3-7, the montage features several films, and cuts them together so that it is obvious the montage consists of different films. The main indication is the difference in color and black and white film, but in figures 4-7 we can also clearly see that these are two different actors. Similar montages are used for the recruitment of Gabčík and Kubiš, their parachuting into occupied Czechoslovakia, and the aftermath the assassination, including their hiding and the obliteration of Lidice, a village falsely linked to the Czechoslovakian
resistance responsible for the assassination. While HhhH includes live action footage, such as interviews with villagers, the son of a high ranking Nazi official, and history enthusiasts, its reliance on non-documentary footage for the representation of important events calls attention to the documentary itself as a mediation of the past.
Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney argue that media are not “passive and transparent
conveyers of information” but play an “active role in shaping our understandings of the past, in ‘mediating’ between us (as readers, viewers, listeners) and past experiences” (3). The publication of a novel concerning an untold or suppressed version of history can ignite a newfound interest in marginalized histories, for example. Or, as I find especially poignant in the scene where Binet watches Salon Kitty, representations in circulation mediate how we view parts of and characters in history - such as the trope of the sexually deviant and sadistic Nazi (Kerner 203). Erll and Rigney continue and argue that other than mediation, media are in interaction with themselves, which David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin have called
‘remediation’ (Erll and Rigney 3). Remediation, or the “commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other” is integral to media (Bolter and Grusin, qtd. in Erll and Rigney 3). Erll and Rigney argue that this concept is illuminating for the dynamics of cultural memory, as there is no cultural memory without mediation, and no mediation without remediation (4). The ‘double logic of remediation’ leads to striving for a sense of greater ‘immediacy’, for a more transparent window into the past, creating a sense of ‘unmediated memory’, but paradoxically achieves this by incorporating and recycling a multitude of media (4).
Such abundant use of remediation however can also be used for ‘hypermediacy’, which Erll and Rigney argue “reminds the viewer of the medium, points to the potential self-reflexivity of all memorial media” (4). Highlighting the use of media can create an
‘experience of the medium’ and draw attention to the mediation of memory (5). The incorporation of the author and his book, alongside visual materials such as photographs, archival and other film footage such as the films used to reconstruct the execution of Operation Anthropoid, place at the forefront the interaction between these different media, and how they rely on each other to, indirectly, relate to past events. HhhH employs and incorporates media and existing representation as historical sources to be interpreted. By openly putting them in dialogue with each other, the series creates a ‘hypermediated’ and reflexive documentary in which the viewer is reminded of the media employed and mediation involved in the construction of a historical narrative.
Documentary, as a conventionally truth-bearing form, aims “to represent and create knowledge” whereas “trauma defies a singular unified expression” (McIntosh 3). While in trauma theory the traumatic event is widely conceptualized as unpresentable (Kerler 84-85), Gary Weissman argued that the problem is not that the event is unrepresentable, but that it is
only representable (209). Any representation, he argues, falls short but until we can travel
always miss the mark of how ‘it really was’ (208). By using a plethora of representations and media, from various times, qualities and spoken in a variety of languages, HhhH does not pertain to be a singular and truthful representation of Operation Anthropoid. Similar to William’s analysis of reflexive documentaries I mentioned earlier, HhhH foregoes the presentation of history through a master narrative, and offers the past not as totalizable and “unitary representable truths” but as fragmented, akin to a palimpsest (Williams 15). By foregrounding its own role in the remediation of a story many times told, it asks the viewer to consider their own position, from where they are watching this history unfold.
Fig. 4-5. The Sten gun fails during the assassination.
Fig. 6-7. The throwing of the grenade. Fig. 3. Heydrich being driven in his car.
A Specter Haunts the Present
In the previous section I have laid out how HhhH employs hypermediacy to develop a self-reflexive stance towards its own position, and foregrounds its remediation whilst
simultaneously making the viewer aware of their position. The incorporation of the author as character and his dialogue with existing representations of his story, however, is interwoven with the reenactment of Heydrich in the present by German actor Detlef Bothe. In the opening episode of the series, Bothe is introduced as an actor who has a striking physical similarity to Heydrich and is hence regularly asked to play him in films such as Lidice (2011) and
Anthropoid (2016). In the first encounter with Bothe, he puts on his Heydrich uniform and
explains that when he plays Heydrich his behavior off-set also changes – he increasingly becomes like him, sterner and impatient. He explains that he has studied Heydrich’s body language and manner of movement based on footage that is left of him. Simultaneously we see Bothe as Heydrich walk through contemporary Germany (see fig. 8). This Heydrich returns throughout the series, at sites where he has been before, looking at photographs of his to-be assassins, or simply waiting in a non-descript room with furniture that reminds of the past in which the ‘real’ Heydrich lived.
Fig. 8. Bothe walking around as Heydrich. The subtitle reads: ‘I have carefully studied how Heydrich moved and walked.’
This reenactment in HhhH does not take shape as a historical representation of a past event, creating a sense of the ‘open window’ Erll and Rigney discussed, but rather as a fantasmatic and ‘looming presence’ of the past in the present. Nichols traced the presence of reenactments in documentary and argues that it has always been used, and has been in many different forms. He describes reenactment as “the more or less authentic re-creation of prior events” (“Documentary Reenactment” 72).10 The tension with using reenactment in
documentary is that it must be recognized as a reenactment whilst at the same time this recognition threatens to reduce the reenactment to a fiction (ibid. 73-74).
Unlike the classic documentary image, which shares an indexical bond to the historical event it represents, the reenactment retrieves a lost object (the past) whilst creating a new object through the retrieval. Nichols explains that “[t]he very syntax of reenactments affirms the having-been-thereness of what can never, quite, be here again. Facts remain facts, their verification possible, but the iterative effort of going through the motions of reenacting them imbues such facts with the lived stuff of immediate and situated experience” (“Documentary Reenactment” 80). Whereas reenactments in docufictions or docudramas mostly function to create a sense of unmediated memory, the explicit use of reenactment can add a heightened awareness to the viewing. Williams, too, argued for the reflexive potential of the overt use of reenactment in documentary. Analyzing the various reenactments in The Thin Blue Line (1988) based on competing narratives concerning the murder-case central to the documentary, she proposes that the incorporation of these differing reenactments of the same event “never offers any of them as an image of what actually happened” (13).
Reenactment in HhhH, and as I will later also argue with regards to Waltz with Bashir and The Missing Picture, is not hidden or covert, but performative, and it does not intend to
10 This ‘more or less’ is rather broad, as Nichols discusses documentaries ranging from Robert Flaherty’s
Nanook of the North, in which the Allakariallak tribe was urged to reenact what the Nanook might have done 30 years prior, to Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story in which Carpenter’s life story is reenacted through Barbie and Ken dolls. In the former the reenactment was staged as historical evidence, while in the latter the use of dolls
recreate the past (as a docudrama reenactment) nor to compare itself to other reenactments, as in the case of The Thin Blue Line. Rather, it displays the fantasmatic elements of recollecting Heydrich, and the unobtainability of a historical character, whilst simultaneously signifying the continuing presence of the past in the present. The presence of Heydrich is placed in relation to earlier representations of him – for example, the opening episode incorporates the performances of Heydrich by various actors and highlights how they chose to portray him (cold and cunning, or effeminate and incalculable). A later episode includes a shot where Binet watches a film on his laptop in which Bothe plays Heydrich. This suggests, much like Binet watching Salon Kitty, that the interpretation of the historical figure Heydrich is mediated by representations of him. The way in which Bothe describes ‘getting to know’ Heydrich, by studying his movements, and playing him in several films, is the sort of emphatic engagement with history that the characterization of the author also foregrounds – an engagement generally accepted from an actor but not of a historiographer. The reenactment foregrounds the ‘lived stuff’, in Nichols’ words, in looking back at history. Invoking a
reenactment of Heydrich (albeit with historical footage) when discussing him in the third person, suggests that the Heydrich spoken of in the series is partly the historical Heydrich, partly this reincarnation that looms around in the present, based on interpretation. The facts of Operation Anthropoid remain, but the narration of these facts emerges from the present.
Heydrich’s looming around in the present also creates the sense of a haunted return, or as Nichols says of reenactments: “[t]he viewer experiences the uncanny sense of a repetition of what remains historically unique. A specter haunts the text” (“Documentary Reenactment” 74). This specter haunts the present day narration of history, eyeing it with suspicion and, even when he dies, refuses to go. There are instances when Heydrich looks at pictures of Babi Yar or his assassins, and after the assassination attempt is recounted, Heydrich goes into a drugstore to purchase the antibiotics that could have likely saved him. These are not
reenactments of things Heydrich did, but imaginations of his ghost in the present. Making a character out of Heydrich emphasizes the role of interpretation and storytelling when
approaching the past, but his continual presence in the present throughout the series refuses to let these events be relegated to ‘history’, as if they are finished and worked through. As the series claims in the final episode: ‘history is never finished’.
In his analysis of artworks reenacting the Holocaust, Van Alphen argues that “[t]hese works are not involuntary reenactments of the Holocaust, but rather purposeful attempts to shed the mastery that Holocaust narratives provide” (81). Whereas HhhH continuously reminds the viewer that the story is ‘based on facts’, Heydrich’s impersonation acts out something different, namely that this past is still inexplicitly present and uncontainable. This is further developed by putting past event in conversation with the present. For example, one episode juxtaposes footage and testimonials of Jewish refugees attempting to leave Europe with new footage of present-day refugees trying to enter Europe. Another episode, centering on perpetrators, questions what ‘creates’ a perpetrator, and both discusses high ranking Nazi officials and the perpetrators of the 2016 Bataclan attack that occurred as the docu-series was in production. History in HhhH is not finished, because it can both repeat itself and haunts the inhabitants of the present, as they are still trying to get to terms with atrocious and traumatic historical episodes.
HhhH challenges conventional methods of narrating history in documentary. Rather than
present itself as whole, or a complete version of history, it foregrounds the mediation and remediation of its subject matter and itself as a medium. The uncanny presence of Heydrich in the present further challenges the presentation of a singular version of history. It both reminds of the emphatic engagement necessary to develop a person and story from facts, and the inaccessibility of history other than through mediated representation. As a documentary it
takes a self-reflexive position, and is engaged with its own construction. Both Waltz with
Bashir and The Missing Picture embrace and make explicit their construction and materiality,
much like HhhH. However, while HhhH concerns itself with knowing history as an outsider, or historiographer, ‘after the fact’, Waltz with Bashir deals more explicitly with the problems of ‘traumatic memory’, and complexities involved in narrating and representing inaccessible experiences.
Chapter 2. Redemptive Reenactment: Waltz with Bashir and Animated Memory
“Films can be therapeutic, right?” - Boaz Rein-Buskila in Waltz with Bashir
In the beginning of Waltz with Bashir, Boaz Rein-Buskila poses this question to his filmmaker friend Ari Folman to explain why he entrusted Folman, instead of another
confidant, with his recurring haunting nightmares of the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war in which he fought as an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier. Listening to his friend, Folman is triggered and begins to experience flashbacks of the war leading him to question his involvement in the massacres of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps near Beirut. These massacres were carried out by the Lebanese Christian Phalangist as retribution for the assassination of Lebanon’s president-elect Bashir Geyamel while the territory was officially under IDF occupation.
Waltz with Bashir is the animated feature-length documentary of Folman’s attempts to
recover his memory and retrace his involvement, whilst simultaneously questioning how memory works and fails. In doing so the documentary takes a hybrid form and mixes media to juxtapose present and past, memories, hallucinations and dreams with experts and talking heads, and animation with live action footage. The cut-out animation is akin to graphic novel aesthetics and ‘eerily acidic’, as described by Garret Steward (58), yet often so realistic that is has often been confused for rotoscoping, the technique of drawing over live action footage.11 The film won many prizes, including a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and an IDA Award for Feature Documentary.
In this chapter I want to question the ways in which Waltz with Bashir uses mixed media to attempt to tell a story whilst simultaneously questioning whether this is at all
possible. I will read the documentary against the backdrop of the problems raised by Van Alphen with regards to trauma education as discussed in my introduction. Van Alphen proposes that, with regards to histories of trauma, it might be less suitable to teach those histories (for the purpose of mastery), and more beneficial to approach them in their open-endedness, to evoke a felt understanding of the past based on affect (82).12 I will question how this documentary makes history felt, rather than taught. How is animation used to reenact the past? What does this do for the pedagogical status of the documentary?
First, I will rely on Annabelle Honess Roe’s work on the evocative use of animation in documentary to explain how Waltz with Bashir embraces its own construction while
simultaneously employing animation to evoke an affective response in the viewer and a felt understanding of the past. I will combine this with Nichols’ work on documentary
reenactment as discussed in the previous chapter, to show how the animated reenactments bring a subjective reading of the past into the present. The subjective reading emerges from the evocative use of animation, which expresses the emotional experience, ragged memory and testimonial inconsistencies rather than historical accuracy. This emerges into the present both through the narrative structure of the film, in which reenactments of flashbacks and memory interrupt conversations taking place in the present-day. Animation, as an aesthetic strategy, is employed to negotiate the hazardous representation of ‘traumatic memory’.
The narrative structure of the film follows a logic similar to Freud’s ‘repetition-compulsion’, which is the concept he used to describe the contradicting involuntary return to
12 It is important to note that Van Alphen bases his argument on Holocaust education, and the repetition of certain dogmas particular to this education, such as the unrepresentability of this history, the impossibility to grasp its meaning, its uniqueness, and the necessity to study it. Although the massacres of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps are not taught in the same way, the documentary discusses the Holocaust in several instances and, as Eleanor Kent argued, places itself in a larger context of Holocaust representation by its aesthetic similarity to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. Although Waltz with Bashir has been criticized for portraying Palestinian suffering through a Holocaust informed frame, mostly notably by Antoun and Moratz, the aesthetic choices are informed by this legacy. Even though Van Alphen’s argument is not about the education of this particular catastrophe, the representative strategies of the documentary are informed by the tradition of Holocaust representation and its education, and the film can thus be read within this framework. On the embeddedness of Waltz with Bashir within the tradition of Holocaust representation, see Kent.
and repetition of a traumatic experience to regain mastery. In its use of animated reenactments, Waltz with Bashir endorses a performative rather than descriptive stance towards history and memory, yet at the conclusion of its arc the documentary cuts to live action footage of the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. This return to indexical footage used as evidence, grainy and shaky, is in stark contrast to the slick, sharp animation of the previous 90 minutes. While the rest of the film is contextualized through conversations with experts (psychologist, journalist, former soldiers) and Folman’s voice-over helps
interpret what we see, these final images, in their shock, are expected to speak for themselves - left without subtitles - to convey a truth on their own. Waltz with Bashir balances between non-mastery and mastery, narrative memory and traumatic memory, endorsing the
performativity of remembrance and reverts to documentary as a window into the world.
Evoking the Past
Waltz with Bashir opens in the recent present, as Boaz confides in Folman that he has been
having nightmares of the dogs he used to kill during the war. Folman confesses that he has very little recollection of the war, ‘it is not in his system,’ and denies involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. After they say goodbye, Folman gets in his car and his voice-over addresses the viewer directly to explain that after this night he started getting flashbacks of the war and the massacres. The scene moves into the flashback that will recur twice more in the film. Folman, accompanied by two as of yet unidentified males, floats in the
Mediterranean Sea and looks up at the war damaged buildings of Beirut, contrasted by a yellow sky illuminated with flares. Naked, yet carrying their weapons and wearing their dog tags, the three soldiers emerge from the water, get dressed and slowly make their way into the city, as the color scheme changes from yellow to greyscale. As they turn a corner, they are confronted with a group of soundless, ghost-like women.
Back in the present, Folman visits his friend Ori Sivan, a therapist who explains the dynamics of memory throughout the film, and functions together with Zahava Solomon as an expert on trauma and memory. Ori explains that memory is deceptive, and that we often remember things we did not experience, or replace painful memories with false ones. Folman’s flashback, placing him away from the scene of the massacre, is such a false
memory, or ‘screen memory’. Screen memory, a Freudian concept, refers to the covering of a painful or difficult memory with another, more comfortable memory (Rothberg 13).
Despite its hybridity and use of different temporalities, Waltz with Bashir starts out with a clear narrative arc: Folman’s faulty flashback in the opening scene confronts him with his loss of memory of the war and massacre, leading him to retrace his presence, involvement, and ultimately culpability. The aim laid out in the first scene then is two-fold: to explain and inform on the treacherous workings of the memory of a traumatized subject, and to illuminate Folman’s involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The choice to do so in animation certainly has practical benefits (it is possible to visualize experiences and events of which there is no footage, such as memories and nightmares, and it easier to secure subjects’
anonymity),13 but it also raises questions and problematizes the possibility of telling the story in a traditional documentary format.
In her book Animated Documentary Annabelle Honess Roe distinguishes between documentaries using animation to support minor points and documentaries for which animation is integral to the message they are trying to convey. Animation, as a form of reenactment to illustrate, clarify, and emphasize, has been present in documentary almost since its conception, much like other forms of reenactment. However, documentaries that are entirely animated and for which animation is integral are relatively new. Those for which the animation is integral, which are about the world rather one completely imagined by its author,
13 Kent describes that in Waltz with Bashir two of the interviewees decided to remain anonymous at the last moment, and a voice-actor dubbed their speech. See Kent 307.
and are perceived as a documentary by the public, are what Honess Roe calls an animated documentary.14 For the purpose of my analysis, especially the latter two requirements of the definition are of importance, since it is the claims documentaries make regarding the world, as well as their perception as doing so by an audience, that lend them their pedagogical potential.
An animated documentary is likely to lose a pedagogical status since, as Honess Roe argues on the basis of Bill Nichols: “[t]he authenticity of a documentary, and the strength of its claim to be such a type of film, are deeply linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images bear evidence of events that actually happened, by virtue of the indexical relationship between image and reality” (3). In an animated documentary, with the exception of those that are rotoscoped, the indexical bond between the image and reality is severed, as the image is constructed from scratch – as is the case in Waltz with Bashir. The use of
animation in documentary is similarly controversial to the use of reenactment. As I explained in the previous chapter, the use of reenactment diminishes the truth-value of a documentary as it actively goes against the notion that such films have direct access to reality through its indexical images. Both have been part of documentary strategies since its conception, but depending on their usage tarnish the truth-bearing status of the documentary.
As Nichols distinguishes between various uses of reenactment in documentary, so Honess Roe discerns three uses of animation: mimetic, non-mimetic, and evocative. Mimetic substitution is used as a kind of ‘historical reenactment’, so as to fill in for the lack of footage of events, closely resembling reality.15 Non-mimetic substitution can still be seen as a solution
14 Documentaries that merely rely on animation for illustration, can live without their animation or animated fragments. They might be the lesser for it, but they will still be audible. Honess Roe does not see these
documentaries as animated documentaries. She considers a documentary an animated documentary when it “(i) has been recorded or created frame by frame; (ii) is about the world rather than a world wholly imagined by its creator; and (iii) has been presented as a documentary by its producers and/or received as a documentary by audiences, festivals or critics” (4).
15 Honess Roe argues that the use of non-mimetic animation allows the viewer “to make certain assumptions and allowances and, similar to a reconstruction, says ‘this is a reasonable likeness of what these events looked like the first time they happened and we have chosen to reconstruct them, or in this case animate them, because we
to a practical problem (namely the absence of footage), but ‘embraces and acknowledges’ the medium of animation, foregoing an attempt to resemble reality (Honess Roe 23). Evocation is used to represent the world from a subjective point of view, “as a tool to evoke the
experiential in the form of ideas, feelings and sensibilities” (ibid. 25). Honess Roe
conceptualizes Waltz with Bashir as an evocative documentary, since it uses animation to convey memories, experiences, and the past from a subjective point of view (26). For
example, early in the documentary Folman travels to The Netherlands to meet old friend and former IDF soldier Carmi Can’an.16 Can’an discusses his seasickness on the boat when invading Lebanon, which he falsely remembers as a sort of ‘love boat’. He passed out and hallucinated that a giant, naked woman carried him away as the boat with his fellow soldiers was bombed and lit on fire. Rather than only incorporate Can’an’s testimony, the
hallucination is animated to convey that although Can’an realizes now that it was a hallucination, it is the only memory he has access to – and hence, so does the viewer.
This use of evocative animation strongly reminds of Nichols’ discussion of certain forms of reenactment in documentary. Nichols distinguishes between several forms, but argues that reenactments with the most reflexive potential display their construction openly. Instead of merely trying to recreate the past situation as truthfully as possible, i.e. being as descriptive as possible, these reenactments emphasize the temporality of their attempt to try to make sense of the past in the present. As Nichols explains: “They [reenactments] resurrect a sense of a previous moment that is now seen through a fold that incorporates the embodied perspective of the filmmaker and the emotional investment of the viewer” (“Documentary Reenactment” 88). In its use of evocative animation to convey a felt sense of the past to its
historical and realist reenactment, and feigns a sense of the ‘open window’ into the past that Erll and Rigney described with regards to sense of immediacy through remediation (4).
16 Carmi Can’an’s voice was recorded by Yehezkel Lazarov, an Israeli voice-actor. In this case, both the visual and audial ties to reality are severed.
viewer and give shape to the subjective experience of this past, Waltz with Bashir uses the fantasmatic possibilities of animated reenactment to represent an inaccessible past.
One such example is the scene with Can’an’s hallucination of the giant woman. In this scene the color palette changes drastically, shifting from dark colors to a blue palette when Can’an enters his hallucination, visualizing his separation from what is happening around him. When Folman is asked by a therapist whether he really remembers nothing, he declares that he remembers his furloughs vividly. Subsequently, Folman is pictured back Tel Aviv, but he looks numb and slowly moves through the city, still wearing his army uniform covered in blood. The people around him whizz by, signifying his experience of detachment from everyday life back in Israel. Another such scene is Can’an’s recollection of the Phalangist slaughterhouse where they tortured and murdered Palestinians, keeping their eyes and limbs in jars of formaldehyde. Can’an describes this as being on an ‘LSD trip’, and the ‘camera’ movements and color palette reflect this, using an acidic green sky and darker hues, while slowly moving from a low angle past severed limbs, a black cat and bats in the sky – invoking cultural icons associated with horror (see fig. 9).
Perhaps the most used color palette in the film is the eerie yellow Folman associates with the flares he shot up in the night to illuminate the Phalangist’s actions, implicating himself in the massacre. This yellow appears in the opening scene of the film, as the sky of Boaz’s nightmare reflected in the eyes of the dogs that are chasing him (see fig. 10). It returns in Folman’s flashbacks (see fig. 11), and in the reenactments of journalist Ron Ben-Yishai’s and veteran Dror Harazi’s accounts of the massacres (see figs. 12 - 13). In a way the color is present in Can’an’s hallucination: when he watches the boat lit on fire the color palette turns from red and orange, covering Can’an, the woman and everything in the frame in yellowish hues, reflecting his desire to be separate from this destruction. The color haunts the film as the guilt haunts Folman and his associates.
Waltz with Bashir then is highly evocative, using the animated reenactments of these
experiences to convey something of their presence in the now (the continuing recurrence of yellow imprinted on Folman’s contemporary search into the past), and creates an affective insight into the experiences of war, rather than providing factual knowledge of the
development of a conflict.17 While Van Alphen argues that testimonies are part of the
historical discourse used in taught history, and serve as a resource for ‘learnable knowledge’ (“Playing” 79), the testimonies in Waltz with Bashir are flawed and met with resistance (Can’an does not want to elaborate where he was during the massacre, and Folman is unable to remember for the most part of the film). They are represented as subjective experiences containing references to the impossible (the giant woman, Can’an’s memory of being on a ‘love boat,’ instead of a commando ship, the slaughterhouse’s ‘bad acid trip’ appearance). They thus convey a more affective position towards this history.
Waltz with Bashir clearly displays its own construction, not simply by using evocative
animation to reenact the memories, dreams and hallucinations, but by also animating the talking-heads and conversations Folman has in the present. While some interviewees opted to remain anonymous, Folman could have decided to keep the rest of his filmed footage
unanimated, suggesting an epistemological difference between reenactment and truth based on material and aesthetic strategy. Instead, as Eleanor Kent notes, Folman chose to endorse the creative interventions made in documentary, to move beyond an ironic or reflexive position to try to reclaim ‘the integrity’ of the medium (310). Animation in Waltz with Bashir then puts into questions the film’s relation to the history it attempts to tell. By embracing its own construction, it can explore the possibilities of representing a trauma inaccessible to
17 The lack of focus in the documentary on the historical and political conditions that led to the war, Israeli presence in Lebanon, and the oppression of Palestinians has been critiqued by a variety of scholars and film critics. While I deem much of this critique legitimate, for the scope of this chapter and the focus of this thesis I have chosen not to discuss this at large. For an insightful analysis of perpetrators in Israeli cinema and the lack of responsibility taken in Waltz with Bashir, I recommend Morag. For a discussion of Palestinian absence in the film, see Antoun, and Levy.
psyche and medium.18 In moving away from conventional notions of representation, it created an alternative form.
Animation allows the documentary to circumvent direct representation, and create dramatic reenactments that portray the psychic reality of both its recurrence into the present and separation from it. It resembles the fog in which Folman’s memory is covered, and represents his guilt by covering the memories related to the massacres in yellow. As Nichols argues, a reenactment is an acknowledgement of recreating something that can never be there again. While the documentary foregrounds it’s double remove from the ‘world out there’, it moves beyond Linda Williams analysis of ‘mirrors reflecting mirrors’, and attempts to evoke something beyond reflection. In Waltz with Bashir the animation allows for the past and present to flow in and out of each other, similar to the workings of flashbacks and ‘traumatic memory’.
18 In line with the critique listed in the previous note, the distance towards the events that animation allows also enables the director to circumvent and obfuscate a painful history that he might not want to confront head on. While the sense of guilt is present in the documentary, no responsibility is taken for what has occurred. As I will also argue in my conclusion, the focus on trauma and its representational struggle allows for the glossing over of
