- Title
- Untimely animations: Waltz with Bashir and the incorporation of historical difference
- Creator
- Atkinson, Paul; Cooper, Simon
- Date
- 2012
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/60306
- Identifier
- vital:5960
- Identifier
- http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/08/untimely-animations-waltz-with-bashir-and-the-incorporation-of-historical-difference/
- Identifier
- ISSN:1328-9756
- Abstract
- Waltz with Bashir (Israel 2008) concerns itself with time on a number of formal and thematic levels, from its investigation of history to the use of animation to allow the recreation of an otherwise visually inaccessible past. The animated documentary’s plot interweaves historical and personal time in the form of Israeli soldiers remembering, or attempting to remember, their involvement in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. A central preoccupation of the documentary is the untimeliness of trauma, where a repressed memory kept “out of time” will return to the present in unexpected and distorted forms. This personal experience of trauma is extended to the sphere of national identity in the degree to which the documentary re-examines events that have been largely silenced within the official versions of history within Israel. It is untimely insofar as it disrupts accepted understandings and exposes events that certain constructions of Israeli national identity would rather forget. Of course the dynamic between remembering and forgetting and how best to relate to history, a theme that informs the politics surrounding Waltz with Bashir, was addressed directly by Nietzsche in his Untimely Meditations. In “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life,” he warned of the dangers of an excessive concern for the past, and of the necessity for a certain amount of forgetting as a condition for acting. While Waltz with Bashir investigates directly the repression of the past, of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, it is also haunted by the events of the Holocaust. The forgetting of one is enabled by the specific forms of remembering the other, a question central to the reading of the politics of the documentary.
- Relation
- Screening the Past Vol. 34, no. (2012), p. 1-13
- Rights
- Copyright La Trobe University
- Rights
- Open Access
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- 1902 Film, Television and Digital Media; 2103 Historical Studies
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