Waltz With Bashir Analysis

Waltz with Bashir: Showing Guilt or Lack of It?
One cannot stop himself from feeling sympathetic towards Ari Folman, the Israeli soldier who is trying to recover his memories of what happened during the Sabra and Shatila massacre in the 1980s. Folman shares this journey of recovering his repressed memories in his Animated-documentary film Waltz with Bashir (2009). When watching the film, one question keeps popping in my mind: Why? Why is Folman trying to remember? Why did Folman make this film? If we can determine the real reason of making the film, we can better perceive and understand it. Raz Yosef simply answers these questions in his article “War Fantasies: Memory, Trauma, and Ethics in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir” by saying that this film is really just a “hallucinatory quest” into Folman’s repressed memories of the Sabra and Shatila massacre and that it doesn’t
The above mentioned answer is what made me think again about the real intention of the movie and my first impression of it. When I first watched the movie, I was glad to see that there is an Israeli soldier who was honest enough to actually feel guilty about what he did in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. But after watching the film a few more times, and really understanding what each scene means, I’ve come to the conclusion that although there are a few glimpses of guilt in the film, Folman, the filmmaker, tries to cover up this sense of guilt and assure himself and the audience that he and the rest of the Israeli soldiers had nothing to do with the massacre. With the help of Naira Antoun’s article “Film Review: ‘Waltz with Bashir’”, I argue that Folman is guilty, and knows that he is guilty, but still tries to