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Timezones and loadshedding conspired to keep this critic away from catching the event on television, but in the Youtube world we inhabit today, even the speeches are only some minutes wait with a decent internet connection. Yet the real value of the event, apart from memorable speeches, the heartfelt appreciation and the glamour, is the second lease of life for the otherwise unnoticed and under-appreciated films that get nominated, usually in the foreign film and documentary category.
Waltz with Bashir, is an unconventional documentary from Israel by Ari Folman, nominated for Best Foreign Film. The narrative is a kind of investigative journey of autographical dimensions, a kind of inquiry into the self that intercepts with a particular historical event. Folman, not much older than a kid at the time, served in the Israeli Army during the Lebanon War of 1982. When a friend approached Folman recounting his recurring nightmare from the time he spent in Lebanon, the filmmaker is confronted with his own glaring gaps in his memory.
The traumatic centre of the mystery is the Sabra massacre-a gruesome, organized retaliation against Palestinian refugees by Christian Phalangists, allies of the Israelis, who were enraged at the assassination of their leader Bashir Gemayel. Folman only recalls fragments of the event, even though he places himself only streets away from the camps. He embarks on a quest to uncover his own past and complicity by interviewing his scattered comrades-in-arms. Its live-action footage is painstakingly rendered into animation, save for the gruesome archival footage at the end, a fitting burst of realism in a film about memory and repression.
Adjoining the interviews, which are often with wry and blunt characters, are graphic re-enactments of war-life. Like Richard Linklater's Waking Life, which it automatically draws comparison with, Waltz shares a dream-life quality, a certain nagging vagueness. But with its darker subject, it more frequently dips into the bizarre. The format is almost judicious circumspection, building the contexts and explanation about the soldiers' lifes and the kind of war they were fighting, that at one point you wonder if Folman will ever reveal the actual event. But at its end and without any excuses, he unpacks the ugly truth and the enigmatic tableaux of his own memory.
Man on Wire, this year's Best Doc winner by James Marsh, retells the stunt pulled off by the French tight-rope walker Philippe Petit and his team between New York City's still-incomplete Twin Towers in 1974. Petit, some decades later, still preserves his boyish looks and all of his charms. His retelling is full of theatrical flair and dramatic emonstrations.
Fashioned like an old-fashioned heist story with archival footage and interviews with the many confederates who were charmed and cajoled into abetting Petit, Marsh assembles an entertaining and delightful narrative, culminating with the main event itself, an awe-inspiring and time-stopping work of performance art. The events of September 11th, deliberately unmentioned, haunts the retelling-fake IDs, illegal trucks sneaked past barriers and foreign nationals are generally the kinds of details that generate anxiety.
But it's hard not to read this documentary with its irrepressible optimism and sense of adventure as an attempt to rehabilitate the feeling and emotions around those iconic buildings. There is something undoubtedly insane about the venture. It is not quite a pure act of art with its dimensions of ego, but it is inarguably a courageous and inspiring human act that deserves the documentary treatment it receives.
Waltz with Bashir
Director: Ari Folman
Documentary 2008. 90 mins.
Man on Wire
Director: James Marsh
Documentary 2008. 94 mins.
