Waltz with Bashir, directed by Ari Folman

Waltz with Bashir, directed by Ari Folman, is an undeniably tragic and at times mildly morbid piece of history, spun in a way that entertains the mind, opens the eyes, and leaves you wondering how war can look so beautiful while being so painful. The film opens with an intensely striking scene of wild dogs running through the streets of a city in Lebanon, immediately pulling you into Folman’s journey to recover a memory that has been buried for more than thirty years. In doing so, the film guides you directly into a dream state shaped by fear, guilt, and trauma experienced by characters who feel fictional at first, yet carry very real suffering from the events they survived.

Throughout Waltz with Bashir, it becomes difficult to separate the cartoony figures on screen from the profound tragedy contained in the stories they tell. The hypnotic animation style and psychologically charged color palette draw you in, creating the sensation of overhearing distant horrors through a cracked door at the end of a long, cold, dimly lit hallway. The artistic depictions of Lebanon and life in the Middle East are intercut with scenes rooted in the harsh realities of war, forming a strange and unsettling connection between what we think we know about conflict and what we do not.

As Folman works to resolve his mental block, he reconnects with former comrades and consults therapists who gently guide him through the process of memory retrieval. These encounters are edited together with action sequences, conversations, and music in a way that feels seamless, allowing the film to function as both a retelling and an unraveling of the past in a single movement. The structure drifts past preconceived notions about the Middle East and quietly opens your eyes to lived realities that are often flattened or ignored.

By the end of Waltz with Bashir, the act of therapy extends beyond the filmmaker and those directly involved. It reaches outward, delivering a sudden and sobering sense of reality to the audience. The resolution does not arrive gently. Instead, it wakes you to the sound and weight of war, leaving you with an understanding of why, for those who served, these memories often remain tucked away down a long hallway, preserved in fragments and images that feel unreal even to them.

I encourage you to take the time to watch Waltz with Bashir and form your own conclusions. If you do, feel free to comment or email me your thoughts.

Trailer:

Links below:

http://waltzwithbashir.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLkwfsFzrJw&feature=related

Manufactured Landscapes, directed by Jennifer Baichwal and featuring the photography of Edward Burtynsky

Manufactured Landscapes, directed by Jennifer Baichwal and featuring the photography of Edward Burtynsky, is a surprisingly good piece about Burtynsky’s documentation of global production and its effects on the planet. Initially, I felt like I might be watching a mark off of Baraka directed by Ron Fricke in 1992, one of my personal favorites. However, as the film progresses through shots of massive earth mover trucks that look like toys driving against the massive strip mining operations, it begins to define itself in slightly different terms.

The film opens with a long, rolling dolly shot through a giant production plant in China, accompanied by cinematography from Peter Mettler. Moving through what Burtynsky describes as “the largest industrial incursions I could find,” the sequence does an excellent job of grabbing your visual attention and placing you in a mindset ready to observe and listen. Still photographs of altered landscapes, wide zooms revealing mass pollution, and sweeping pans showing human-driven change make you feel like a giant looking down on an anthill.

Discarded motherboards that resemble a strange blue green haze mark the transition into the middle of the film. Up to this point, the story moves slowly, building its visual argument, but with the introduction of technological debris the documentary becomes more pointed. Scenes of burning, stripping, and discarding electronic waste into unmanaged locations, where computer parts pollute waterways and clutter the landscape, stand in stark contrast to the likable term recyclable goods. The film reinforces this idea by moving through massive container ship yards and then bringing us full circle to muddy graves where these objects are torn apart for scraps. It is overwhelming to see both our great accomplishments and their demise presented side by side.

As the film closes, Manufactured Landscapes avoids assigning blame. Burtynsky does not point a finger, and Baichwal allows the imagery to speak for itself. With music by Evelyn Glennie underscoring the scale of what we are seeing, the film leaves you in awe of how much larger these systems are than any one individual and wondering what role we play within them. The mountain sized gashes in the landscape, the colossal carcasses of container ships, and the endless arms of cranes moving earth make the mind reel. The film ultimately reflects our chosen course on the planet and the consequences that follow, leaving the viewer to decide what to do next.

Trailer:

Further information:
http://www.filmforum.org/films/manufactured.html