Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Waltz with Bashir
2008 · Ari Folman · Waltz with Bashir on Sightlines
A naked man walks out of a black sea at night. Flares are coming down over the city behind him and the water has gone orange under them. It is the most reproduced image in Waltz with Bashir, and for most of the film it is also the only thing Ari Folman has. He was nineteen, an infantryman in Lebanon in 1982. Two decades on he cannot remember his war. He has the sea, the flares, the young bodies coming up out of the water. He does not know whether it happened.
Bergson said we recognize things two ways. Usually it is automatic: you see the chair, you sit, nothing gets thought. Sometimes recognition stalls, and then you circle the thing and go looking through memory for something that fits. Deleuze's whole account of postwar cinema turns on that second kind breaking down. You go looking and nothing comes back. When it happens, a character stops being someone who acts on a situation and becomes someone who can only look at one. Folman opens by admitting the breakdown. A friend describes a nightmare that keeps returning; Folman reaches for the matching memory of his own and finds a blank.
Deleuze calls what is left a pure optical and sound situation, an opsign: a piece of the world you can only see and hear, because no action is available that would change it. His examples come from Italian neorealism, and they tend to be innocent ones, a maid or a child, someone too small to intervene. The figure he built out of them is the voyant, the seer. Folman found the unbearable version. At Sabra and Shatila, Phalangist militiamen killed Palestinian and Lebanese civilians inside the camp while the IDF held the perimeter and fired flares over it. The soldier's only act was to make the scene visible. Seeing was the job. This is where the concept earns itself rather than decorating the film: it names exactly what kind of person Folman was, and it explains the amnesia. A seer who cannot stop the thing he is lighting has one option left, which is to stop seeing it afterwards.
The machinery looks conventional at first. Each interview triggers a flashback. Deleuze has a name for that: the recollection-image, the dated flashback, a former present retrieved and screened in the service of the present that asked for it. Obedient, closed, well-behaved. Folman builds the machine and then lets it fail. As testimonies pile up, earlier flashbacks get revised and contradicted, and the film never goes back to redraw the first version. Both stay. What you are moving through stops being a line back to an event and becomes what Deleuze called sheets of past: regions of the past coexisting, entered from different angles, none of them the floor. The structure is psychoanalytic (symptom, hunt through associations, repressed core) but the hunt goes sideways at least as much as it goes down.
Then the animation. Everything is drawn, the interviews included, so a man talking in a bar and a soldier frozen mid-impossible-pose in a Beirut street are made from the same line, the same weight, the same short palette of deep black, sulfur yellow, cold sea-blue. Photographic cinema has always marked the difference. Grain, a filter, a dissolve: the flashback announces itself. Folman removed the marking. What is left is the crystal-image, Deleuze's term for an image in which the actual and the virtual, the thing happening and the memory or dream of it, swap places too fast to be told apart. Mirrors are his usual instance. Animated documentary is a more complete crystal than any mirror, because the indistinction is not staged inside the image. It is the material the image is made of.
The sea is the finest specimen. Deleuze would call it a crystalline description: a description that does not point at an object existing before it, but composes one and then stands in its place. Folman's flare-lit water is not the record of a night. It makes a night, and occupies the spot where the night should be. The film holds the difference open between what happened, what was dreamed, and what was assembled afterwards, and it never closes it.
Which is a fight with documentary itself. Bazin's argument for photography was that the image is a mould, that light came off the real thing and touched the film, and the credibility lives in that contact. Nonfiction has drawn on the credit ever since. Drawing has none of it. Folman spends the difference deliberately. He recorded real interviews and shot live-action reference first, then threw away the photograph and kept the drawing; the studio was firm that this was not rotoscope, that the figures were rebuilt rather than traced, which is why they came out heavy and slightly wrong. Two interviewees asked not to appear as themselves, and their testimony was kept while face and voice were altered. A photographic documentary could not survive that disclosure. This one absorbs it, having never promised a likeness. Deleuze's powers of the false is not permission to lie. It is what becomes possible once true and false stop being decidable. Folman's claim is that on this subject the mind that survived it cannot hand you a photograph, and the film that pretends otherwise is telling the bigger lie.
Because nothing was captured, everything must be read. Deleuze's word for an image in that state is the lectosign: the image that has lost its automatic sensory-motor sense and become legible instead. A lone soldier dwarfed by architecture, a tank crew in silhouette on a ridge, light that follows emotional rather than physical logic. Not records. Propositions. The soundtrack does the opposite work. The voices are the veterans' actual recorded testimony with the hesitations and the flatness left in, and Max Richter's score, the gunfire, the wash of the sea supply a body the drawing does not have. So the truth-claim and the pictures run on separate tracks, touching across a gap. Deleuze found this first in Duras, sound and image as two self-standing wholes telling different stories. Here it is load-bearing: the guarantee has moved into the voice, and the picture floats above it.
The title is a posture. A soldier steps into a Beirut street, fires a machine gun in a spin and turns as though dancing, beneath a torn poster of Bashir Gemayel, the assassinated president-elect. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls an attitude like this a gest: a posture that stops being psychology and becomes the display of a social relation, held long enough to be read. It is not a character beat. It is the entire political situation squeezed into one body, a man waltzing with a dead man's picture while the picture comes apart above him. And it works because of how the whole film moves. The figures have a marionette stiffness, weight without fluency, people walking as if underwater, faces that hold instead of emoting. Deleuze's cinema of the body is precisely that, attitudes and postures carrying duration where action used to be. Numbness given a gait.
One concept the film raises against itself. Deleuze argued that modern political cinema can no longer assume a people to speak for and has to work through their absence: the people are missing. Here that is literal and structural. The witnesses are the perimeter. Veterans, a psychologist, a trauma researcher, a journalist. The dead of Sabra and Shatila give no testimony. They are the terminus the editing circles and defers for an hour. Folman animates nearly all of his film. Nearly. The last movement gives up an image the drawing cannot metabolize, and what arrives is not absolution. Whether that is honesty about the limits of a soldier's memory or a beautiful surface that keeps the war inside an Israeli head is the argument the film has been having since 2008, and it is the best reason to watch it twice.
None of this came from nowhere. Resnais is the parent twice. Night and Fog supplied the slow camera crossing an emptied atrocity site under a mournful voice, and the tactic of withholding the confrontation until the end; Folman's structure of dread is that deferral, stretched to feature length. Hiroshima mon amour supplied the actual cutting grammar of the interviews, present-tense speech interrupted by involuntary image, memory arriving as a cut rather than as a story. From Marker's Sans Soleil comes the first-person essay voice that treats its own memory as an unreliable archive; Folman aims that instrument at himself and makes himself the suspect. Lanzmann's Shoah is the deepest debt and the most interesting, because Folman inverts it. Lanzmann built an atrocity film entirely from recorded testimony and refused every archival image of the event; Folman records testimony the same way and then draws the images Lanzmann would not use. Both refuse the archive. One leaves the space empty, one fills it with something openly unreal. Morris's The Thin Blue Line had already made reenactment frankly subjective, restaging a contested event in stylized scored repetitions, which is the licence for Folman's music-driven memory sequences. The waltz itself descends from Apocalypse Now, where combat was choreographed to music as operatic hallucination; Folman shrinks the helicopter assault down to one man and one gun and keeps the exhilaration, plus the shame.
Downstream it is easy to underrate now. It landed inside a turn-of-the-decade wave of animated nonfiction and became that wave's argument, the film that made drawing a serious documentary instrument rather than a workaround. It sits in the Israeli reckoning with 1982 next to Beaufort, with Lebanon a year behind it. And it is the clearest case of what later critics, extending Deleuze past his death, named the neuro-image: a film that does not depict a mind but travels through one, assembling itself from a bank of fragments that can be recombined and revised. The invention is Folman's, and it is exact. He built a documentary whose truth lives in the voice track and whose images are avowedly, gorgeously untrustworthy, and then made the untrustworthiness the subject.
Watch it again and watch for the revisions. Somewhere in the middle, a testimony will quietly contradict a picture you were handed twenty minutes earlier, and the film will not go back and fix the picture. It keeps both. That is the crystal, and it is also the honest shape of what a man knows about the worst night of his life.
Concepts in play
- two-recognitions — Folman, prompted by a friend's recurring nightmare, reaches for his own corresponding memory of his 1982 service and finds it blank — attentive recognition stalls and finds nothing to return with.
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns) — The soldiers hold the perimeter at Sabra and Shatila and fire flares over the camp while the killing happens inside: a situation they can only see and light, with no action available that would change it.
- the seer (voyant) — Folman is investigator and witness rather than agent throughout; the film's veterans testify to watching, and his amnesia is the aftermath of a seeing he could not act on.
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — The editing's basic unit: each interview triggers a dated flashback to a former present — a machine the film builds and then lets fail as accounts contradict one another.
- sheets of past — The braided chronology in which flashbacks are revised or contradicted as new testimony accumulates, without the earlier version being withdrawn — the past entered as coexisting regions rather than a line back to the event.
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Interviews, dreams and reconstructed combat are all animated in one continuous visual grammar — same line, same weight, same palette of deep black, sulfurous yellow and cold sea-blue — so present testimony and hallucination cannot be told apart.
- crystalline description — The naked man rising from the sea under falling flares: the film's most reproduced image, and one that composes the night it appears to record, standing in for an event Folman cannot verify.
- powers of the false — Real interviews and live-action reference are shot first, then discarded in favour of drawing (explicitly not rotoscope); two interviewees' faces and voices are altered while their testimony is kept — the film sustains an undecidability between what happened, what was dreamed and what was reconstructed.
- lectosign (the readable image) — Every element of the frame is authored rather than captured — silhouettes against flarelight, a lone soldier dwarfed by architecture, lighting that obeys emotional rather than physical logic — so the image must be deciphered rather than taken as record.
- audiovisual disjunction — The veterans' actual recorded voices, with their hesitations and flatness, carry the documentary guarantee while the drawn image floats above them; Richter's score, gunfire and the sea supply the bodily world the animation lacks.
- the gest — The title sequence: a soldier fires a machine gun in a spin in the middle of a Beirut street, turning as if dancing, beneath a torn poster of the assassinated Bashir Gemayel.
- cinema of the body (attitudes & postures) — The deliberate marionette stiffness of the figures — heavy, restrained movement, people moving as if underwater, faces that hold rather than emote — a technique developed specifically to avoid rotoscope's fluid naturalism.
- the people are missing — The film's witnesses are the perimeter — fellow veterans, a psychologist, a trauma expert, a journalist — while the Palestinian and Lebanese dead of the camp give no testimony and arrive only as the deferred terminus, outside the drawing.
- neuro-image (post-Deleuzian extension) — The film moves through Folman's mind rather than depicting it, assembling itself from recurring motifs (the sea, flares, feral dogs, the airport) that return, recombine and are revised as the investigation proceeds.