Many viewers may wonder, since it is reproducing such a cruel historical fact, will the animation form appear to be joking or not serious? In any case, the animation is fictitious, and the impact brought by the real image must be relatively weaker, is the director just To try it out? However, the truth is that despite a mere $2 million production budget for the film "Waltz with Bashir", French audiences and professional film critics who previewed samples at Cannes gave Foreman's personal attempt extremely high praise. Praise, the art director Fremont has privately revealed that he is very fond of the film. After the film was released on a large scale in French art theaters, almost all media gave the highest score, affirming the film's innovation in the use of animation to express records, a kind of "alternative mining of realism". The animation-style character modeling and performance style have become the most memorable points of this film.
At the beginning of the film, in the nightmare of the protagonist's former comrades-in-arms, the eyes of 26 evil dogs flickered with yellow and fierce evil light. into pieces. The comrades confided to Forman about the nightmare that tortured him every night. The 26 vicious dogs were the wild dogs outside the village who were ordered to shoot during the occupation of Lebanon. The soul is forever imprisoned in the long night to come. As for why there are 26, in dreams we always know we know.
This comrade-in-arms was deeply tormented by the war he experienced when he was young. When Foreman was asked if he was also affected, he reluctantly said that he had forgotten it long ago, and he was still a TV producer. The memory of the war at the age of 19 is also abstracted to the scene of three boys bathing in golden waters and walking out into the ruins of the city filled with gunpowder, and nothing else.
However, the words of his comrade-in-arms still haunted him. He knocked on the lawyer's door, and the lawyer told him a psychological experiment about memory: "Show a group of ten pictures of them when they were young, and nine of them are real. Another photo of them when they were kids is fake. The fake one is a portrait cut from another photo and pasted on a photo of a playground. Eighty percent of people recognized that photo , 20 percent didn't remember. When the researchers asked them again, this time, they said they had some impressions. They remembered a completely fabricated experience, and the memory is constantly changing and alive. If If any detail is missing, the memory will make up for it with something that never happened." The lawyer advised Foreman that if he really cared, he should ask other people who were with him at the time. Foreman worried about whether he would recall memories that he should not have recalled, and another remark from the lawyer made him embark on a journey.
In the film, Foreman interviewed a total of nine people, seven of whom were real, and Foreman just turned their faces into animations. The other two borrowed other people's stories at the request of the parties.
In June 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon on a large scale, occupying one-third of its territory, and the troops assembled on the outskirts of Beirut.
During the interview, the fragments of the memory are gradually put together - doing nothing before the battle; survivors choose to swim from the sea to the other side of the sea after the raid; life and death are uncertain; the little boy with a bazooka in the orchard; short A short 24-hour family leave; the fantasy of traveling around the world at an abandoned airport; the news of the assassination of Bashir provokes the fury of the Falangists in Lebanon; the Israeli army supports the Falangists into the Palestinian refugee camps... Forman Recognizing that it was at that time that he indirectly facilitated the massacre of the Falangists made him choose to escape this unbearable shadow.
He recalled that when he entered the alley of slaughter that had just been stopped, there were corpses everywhere, and he saw a little boy with curly hair with only one head showing in the rubble, his hair was very similar to Foreman's younger brother, and flies were flying around. The boy's eyes were shut, dust and gravel blew into his face, and this young innocent life fell victim to a frantic race war.
The reason why the Lebanese Christian Falangist militias are slaughtering Palestinian refugees to vent their anger is all because of the assassination of their beloved leader, Bashir. And the most exciting (or titled) section of the film is when the young soldiers jumped out of the bunker tunnels, waltzing unscrupulously in the hail of bullets, and behind them was a huge poster of Bashir full of bullet holes. The soldier at this moment has crossed life, stepped on fear, and the bunker tunnel has become the boundary between human and superman. He is like a pioneer in the rhythm of jazz, rock, and Chopin Bach to accuse war, and it can be said that he sacrificed his life to himself. The martyr of the last carnival, the scene in front of him was separated from reality and became magical, just like in hell where everyone was groaning and suffering, someone suddenly laughed.
The most shocking part of the film is at the end, when Forman walked into the slaughtered alley and saw those dead families and piles of women and children, the scene turned and a real image appeared. In the same alley, with the desperate cries of the surviving refugees, the horror in the animation also became a bloody reality. The camera followed up to a pile of stones, which revealed the head of a little boy with curly hair lightly in the breeze. Shaking slightly, his eyes were tightly closed, and he passed away forever with a childish look on his face, and the screen has been black since then. However, the audience in front of the screen could not take their eyes off the screen. The emotional impact and the heavy heart at the moment had to be choked in the throat. It was like being pulled back to reality while watching a movie. The sudden truth left us breathless.
This kind of feeling that you want to convey to the audience is also one of the purposes of the film's main use of animation techniques. In this regard, Forman can know from a dialogue with an expert in the film that Forman was surprised that he would really forget such an important life experience and went to consult an expert. The expert's explanation was: "Some People who have experienced something terrible and feel like a bystander to the event. I once interviewed a young man, an amateur war photographer, and I asked him in 1983 'How did you survive such a brutal war? Yes?' he replied 'it's not difficult at all, I take it as a safe experience' and he said to himself 'wow! It's a big scene: bullets flying, explosions, amputated limbs, and lifelike The screams...' He looked like he was watching a war movie with 3D glasses. Then, all of a sudden, his 'stereo glasses' broke, and the truth came out, leaving an indelible mark in his heart in an instant. Trauma. When he got to some stables near Beirut, it was a racetrack. He saw a large number of carcasses of Arabian horses slaughtered, 'I feel heartbroken' and the photographer said 'Why are those horses suffering so much?' He couldn't watch the wounded and dead animals in front of his eyes, and he had an automatic protection mechanism in his heart that made him remember it clearly and seemed to stay out of it. It felt like watching a war movie instead of being in it. This self-protection mechanism , he wanted to selectively lose his memory. Once he escaped from the scene, he felt that what he had just experienced was just a dream. But the nightmare came with each night, and he was terrified."
And now, as we see, the director finally confronts He captured his escaping memory and made it into a movie in detail. This reminds me of the Japanese modern artist Yayoi Kusama. She had hallucinations at the age of 5. She was afraid of men in her heart, so she chose to face these fears that invaded her spirit and made some of these works of art and presented them in front of the world . According to her, fear is not defeated, but she chooses to live with it, accepting it as a part of herself. Trauma as small as an individual or as large as the entire human race should be faced bravely, and they have demonstrated this in their own way.
Through the last real video shot, the director once again emphasized to the audience that what he saw was not a dream, but the massacre that actually happened in Lebanon. Just a few years ago, this scene was played out again in small villages on the Palestinian-Israeli border. The morbid war has still not left our reality.
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