Shea Blog

Class Repsonse #1
Shea Garber September 16, 2009
In our first class of Jewish Film and Literature, we watched the beginning of the animated documentary film Waltz with Bazir. The film, released in 2008 and written and directed by Israeli Ari Folman, deals with the everyday struggle within soldiers, specifically himself, by post-tramatic stress. While the immidiate effect of war and violence is broadcasted day to day by our newspapers, televisions and computers, not enough light is shed upon the mental aspect of war and the toll it takes upon a soldier of war. Waltz with Bazir is an account by Ari Foldman, depicting his own tale of everyday struggle linked to his actions during the First Lebanon War of 1982.

In the film’s first moments, a fast-paced, intense scene depicts 26 skinny, angry dogs taking the streets of Israel by storm, frightening many Israeli bystanders, until the reach the balcony of a aparment building. As the dogs look up into the balcony, a bodiless man, only his sad face emerged from the shadows of his apartment, turns to face the dogs. The dogs call for the man, Boaz, as the film shifts to a new scene of the same man in a bar with another man. Boaz is revealed to be a former soldier of Israel during the First Lebanon War, who was ordered to kill the guard dogs of each village the Israeli army would enter looking for enemies of the state. Boaz reveals that he has had this same dream of being haunted by the 26 dogs he killed in the army to his friend, who shows discontent and confusion towards Boaz’s grief. After telling Boaz a memory so old could not haunt a man and leaving, this friend has flashback to his time in the army and its affect.

We discussed as a class the effects of memory. Should one block out a harmful, yet revealing memory to restrict pain? Or should one embrace the same memory in order to better know one self? I believe that suppressing such drastic memories is unhealthy to a man, and that he should discover the depths of such memories in order to have better peace within himself. Bottling up emotions and memories almost always does more harm than good, and as we dive deeper into the film and its themes, we will see the effects of revisiting the actions of man years after the fact.