Unifying, as America was on that day and the first few weeks, months that followed. And then this.
Showing posts with label tragedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tragedy. Show all posts
Sunday, September 11, 2011
The Silence of 9/11
Best tribute I've found yet, a New York City man filling that amazing monument and tying us together again in honest grief, with a song nearly 50 years old:
Sunday, October 31, 2010
George Hickenlooper
On Saturday a good man, a friend and an unusually talented independent American filmmaker, George Hickenlooper, was found dead in a Denver hotel room, where he had just arrived from yet another successful pre-release event for his career-changing feature, Casino Jack. George was in Denver to be with his brother, John, who is running for Governor of Colorado. George was 47 years old and leaves behind his wife and young son.
George's untimely death is tragic at so many levels, both personal and professional, and his Facebook page has literally hundreds of wallposts from friends from all over. As a filmmaker he first made his name with the Emmy Award-winning Hearts of Darkness documentary taken from Eleanor Coppola's Apocalypse Now behind the scenes footage, and he was known for The Man from Elysian Fields (directing James Coburn, Anjelica Huston and, for God's sake, Mick Jagger, among others) and Factory Girl (a resonant vision of the 1960's Andy Warhol) along with his extraordinary series of black and white Web videos with major actors in support of the Writer's Strike several years ago.
Casino Jack, which I saw with George by his invitation at a private screening at CAA along with several other excellent filmmakers, is brilliant in being both raucously funny and a reliable telling of a true story, how Jack Abramoff fed the Bush-era GOP with scandalously dirty money. During the screening George would occasionally interject, to our laughter of disbelief, "That really happened." So one tragic aspect of this loss is that he died on the eve of his greatest triumph, an actor's director in an age of special effects directors, and there's no telling what he might have achieved with his new-found cachet.
It's a personal loss, moreso for friends of mine who have known George longer, but nonetheless as someone who was always engaging, personally solicitous and ever-ready to help with a needed connection or advice. And, of course, the greatest loss of all for his family, particularly his boy.
If you want to know what people who worked with him, received encouragement from him, sparred with him on the Web (where he was a participant in cinematic discussions) or simply knew him from his work or writing, check out these comments on Deadline and Hollywood Elsewhere. And here's George in his own words from Hollywood Elsewhere as well.
Rest in Peace, George. We lost you too soon.
George's untimely death is tragic at so many levels, both personal and professional, and his Facebook page has literally hundreds of wallposts from friends from all over. As a filmmaker he first made his name with the Emmy Award-winning Hearts of Darkness documentary taken from Eleanor Coppola's Apocalypse Now behind the scenes footage, and he was known for The Man from Elysian Fields (directing James Coburn, Anjelica Huston and, for God's sake, Mick Jagger, among others) and Factory Girl (a resonant vision of the 1960's Andy Warhol) along with his extraordinary series of black and white Web videos with major actors in support of the Writer's Strike several years ago.
Casino Jack, which I saw with George by his invitation at a private screening at CAA along with several other excellent filmmakers, is brilliant in being both raucously funny and a reliable telling of a true story, how Jack Abramoff fed the Bush-era GOP with scandalously dirty money. During the screening George would occasionally interject, to our laughter of disbelief, "That really happened." So one tragic aspect of this loss is that he died on the eve of his greatest triumph, an actor's director in an age of special effects directors, and there's no telling what he might have achieved with his new-found cachet.
It's a personal loss, moreso for friends of mine who have known George longer, but nonetheless as someone who was always engaging, personally solicitous and ever-ready to help with a needed connection or advice. And, of course, the greatest loss of all for his family, particularly his boy.
If you want to know what people who worked with him, received encouragement from him, sparred with him on the Web (where he was a participant in cinematic discussions) or simply knew him from his work or writing, check out these comments on Deadline and Hollywood Elsewhere. And here's George in his own words from Hollywood Elsewhere as well.
Rest in Peace, George. We lost you too soon.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Sadway
Tragic, yes, but oddly ironic:
Multi-millionaire Jimi Heselden, the owner of Segway Inc. since December 2009, has died after reportedly driving a Segway scooter off a cliff and into a river.Okay, maybe not that oddly.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Time Stands Still
Mad Men, SPOILERS.
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This week's episode, "The Grown-Ups," is the one that will be shown in history classes deep into the future when professors want their students to understand the pivotal nature of this particular week in U.S. history, when our fresh young President was assassinated and the man accused of the crime was himself erased just a few days later.
What Mad Men did so successfully with their extensive use of archival television broadcast footage, and the backdrop of the epic story built around Dick Whitman's exhausting quest to be the best Don Draper he can be, was to contextualize the footage so we viewers could both experience what first nationwide trauma shared over mass media felt like as well as understand why it was the turning point, the end of the 1950's, the moment with all its unanswered questions that continue to haunt our nation to this day.
Kennedy's assassination puts the world in a tailspin, with all of the characters glued to the TV to try and make sense of what has happened. Back then there was no such thing as channel surfing, mainly just sitting on one of the three network channels with whichever newscaster(s) you preferred. There was no mosaic reality of current media choices, no multitudes of cable channels or infinite Internet space, no amateur video footage of planes crashing into buildings showing up scant hours after the disaster -- even the Zapruder film is yet to be developed in a film lab. We relied on the trusted newscasters, many of which had earned our trust as part of Edward Murrow's crack WWII reporting troupe, to interpret for us in black and white, replete with vertical roll, nothing so tethered as today's digital reliability. A world a-jitter, hanging on by a thread.
This was certainly the moment Mad Men has been building towards since the pilot, per the mid-century anthropological theme that is the show's foundation. Presidential assassination is perhaps the most taboo of homicides, as it not only affects individuals and families like all other murders but, in cases like Kennedy and Lincoln, can change a nation's fate. While it's an axiom of drama that true character is revealed under pressure, Mad Men shows how this impossibly momentous trauma causes several characters to make long-simmering, life-changing decisions. Veils are lifted, scales fall from eyes. Authority is ignored -- after all, as Pete points out, if we can't protect the most wanted man in America from vigilante justice while under police protection, then there is no functioning system.
What's interesting is how those making these decisions do so by connecting with a partner, while other characters do not so much change as remain boxed in.
We see a new Betty, still processing the forced revelation of her husband's terminal duplicity, now seeing the world with an adult's skepticism rather than the childish moods of the past. She no longer cares what Don knows or finds out: "He's been lying to me for years." Film director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune, Barfly) in his first Mad Men engagement delivers a Vertigo-like moment for Betty, a vision made more dreamy by the dissolve that leads into it, as she emerges from the powder room at the end of Roger's daughter's wedding and walks towards two men at once, Don and Henry with their backs to each other, and up until she takes her husband's arm we're not exactly sure who she'll choose to leave with. The real decision comes after Oswald's assassination by Jack Ruby, which jolts her out of her chair to cry, "What the hell is going on?!?" and drives her to Henry's promising arms, as much a reaction to Don's refrain, "It's all going to be okay."
These were the two repeated refrains from the episode, beginning with Don's spooky turn around a corner in the office, all the telephones suddenly ringing and the main room empty as employees gather around Harry's television. "What's going on?" he says but quickly gets the picture. And while he's the one taking on the expected daddy role by claiming everything with be fine throughout the show, it's Peggy who has the last repetition, referring to the time they have to redo the AquaNet ad before shooting, now too reminiscent of the assassination scene to be broadcast.
Pete is the other rebel, joining with Trudi in what now appears to be a smart and solid partnership where she agrees with him that the system is broken, both in the government and at Sterling Cooper. While Pete is odious in so many other ways, he's actually the most forward-looking executive at the company, but is dealing to a corporate loss to Ken Cosgrove, ironically referred to by Pete as "Ken and his haircut," just as JFK's detractors would say America elected the haircut, not the man.
Meanwhile Don is increasingly cut off from all humanity, whether powerless at work to hire a quality Art Director due to Lane's budgeting edicts, shorn of his soul-mate elementary school teacher, estranged from Betty due to his tangle of dishonesties, unable to connect with Roger at the wedding thanks to his previous resentments. Roger is also finding himself isolated, with his young wife acting childish and denying him a grown-up partner, reaching out instead to Joan who now lives on the show's narrative margins, she the most capable adult of all.
The episode begins with Pete asleep and ends with Don anesthetizing himself yet again, having come to the office with no other place to go on the sudden National Day of Mourning. Pete wakes up over the course of the episode but Don ends it hitting the bottle, sticking with his dream state. Don finds Peggy also at the office and the two of them are kindred spirits, both alone in their own ways, survivors who can take the events of the week in greater stride than others due to their own traumatic experiences, but Don is still unable to make a complete connection. He's too full of grief from Betty's declaration of no longer loving him, too isolated by the role he's built for himself in terminal pursuit of the American Dream. Peggy goes off to watch the funeral in Bert's office while Don returns to the shadows that are the dominant visual for him this week, once again trapped visually in a doorframe, reaching for the bottle. It's obvious by now that Don is an alcoholic, and that it's as much a trap as his adopted identity, company and marriage.
The rebels, the ones more alive now, are in cells of two, a foreshadowing of the 1960's political cells to come -- the ones committed, sometimes violently, to creating change. While the Beatles will be important culturally should the next season pick up in 1964, it's five more years until the next big hits, when both Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy fall from assassin bullets within two months of each other, by which time the more festering trauma of the Vietnam War will be tearing our nation apart.
The question for the season finale is whether we'll see Don Draper somehow rising to the occasion and pulling back together the threads of his life at home and at work, as he's done with varying degrees of success in each of the previous two seasons. Is the change creator Matthew Weiner has touted all season is a permanent trajectory or simply a more sophisticated form of standard television series machinations? Will Betty discover Henry to be a fraud and return home to Don? Will Joan return as Office Manager and Sal as Art Director? Will Pete someone get over on Ken and take the top account position? Will Peggy and Don unite to become a team again?
From the very beginning the big vision and big promise has been depicting the decade of greatest, most rapid change in modern American history, at least since the Civil War one hundred years earlier. If, as Weiner has said, Mad Men is a show about "not getting what you want," then the potential for real dramatic and potentially structural change must be met. Especially the week after so convincingly depicting the historical earthquake that began on November 22, 1963 at 12:30pm CST in Dallas, Texas.
We'll all be watching.
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.
.
.
This week's episode, "The Grown-Ups," is the one that will be shown in history classes deep into the future when professors want their students to understand the pivotal nature of this particular week in U.S. history, when our fresh young President was assassinated and the man accused of the crime was himself erased just a few days later.
What Mad Men did so successfully with their extensive use of archival television broadcast footage, and the backdrop of the epic story built around Dick Whitman's exhausting quest to be the best Don Draper he can be, was to contextualize the footage so we viewers could both experience what first nationwide trauma shared over mass media felt like as well as understand why it was the turning point, the end of the 1950's, the moment with all its unanswered questions that continue to haunt our nation to this day.
Kennedy's assassination puts the world in a tailspin, with all of the characters glued to the TV to try and make sense of what has happened. Back then there was no such thing as channel surfing, mainly just sitting on one of the three network channels with whichever newscaster(s) you preferred. There was no mosaic reality of current media choices, no multitudes of cable channels or infinite Internet space, no amateur video footage of planes crashing into buildings showing up scant hours after the disaster -- even the Zapruder film is yet to be developed in a film lab. We relied on the trusted newscasters, many of which had earned our trust as part of Edward Murrow's crack WWII reporting troupe, to interpret for us in black and white, replete with vertical roll, nothing so tethered as today's digital reliability. A world a-jitter, hanging on by a thread.
This was certainly the moment Mad Men has been building towards since the pilot, per the mid-century anthropological theme that is the show's foundation. Presidential assassination is perhaps the most taboo of homicides, as it not only affects individuals and families like all other murders but, in cases like Kennedy and Lincoln, can change a nation's fate. While it's an axiom of drama that true character is revealed under pressure, Mad Men shows how this impossibly momentous trauma causes several characters to make long-simmering, life-changing decisions. Veils are lifted, scales fall from eyes. Authority is ignored -- after all, as Pete points out, if we can't protect the most wanted man in America from vigilante justice while under police protection, then there is no functioning system.
What's interesting is how those making these decisions do so by connecting with a partner, while other characters do not so much change as remain boxed in.
We see a new Betty, still processing the forced revelation of her husband's terminal duplicity, now seeing the world with an adult's skepticism rather than the childish moods of the past. She no longer cares what Don knows or finds out: "He's been lying to me for years." Film director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune, Barfly) in his first Mad Men engagement delivers a Vertigo-like moment for Betty, a vision made more dreamy by the dissolve that leads into it, as she emerges from the powder room at the end of Roger's daughter's wedding and walks towards two men at once, Don and Henry with their backs to each other, and up until she takes her husband's arm we're not exactly sure who she'll choose to leave with. The real decision comes after Oswald's assassination by Jack Ruby, which jolts her out of her chair to cry, "What the hell is going on?!?" and drives her to Henry's promising arms, as much a reaction to Don's refrain, "It's all going to be okay."
These were the two repeated refrains from the episode, beginning with Don's spooky turn around a corner in the office, all the telephones suddenly ringing and the main room empty as employees gather around Harry's television. "What's going on?" he says but quickly gets the picture. And while he's the one taking on the expected daddy role by claiming everything with be fine throughout the show, it's Peggy who has the last repetition, referring to the time they have to redo the AquaNet ad before shooting, now too reminiscent of the assassination scene to be broadcast.
Pete is the other rebel, joining with Trudi in what now appears to be a smart and solid partnership where she agrees with him that the system is broken, both in the government and at Sterling Cooper. While Pete is odious in so many other ways, he's actually the most forward-looking executive at the company, but is dealing to a corporate loss to Ken Cosgrove, ironically referred to by Pete as "Ken and his haircut," just as JFK's detractors would say America elected the haircut, not the man.
Meanwhile Don is increasingly cut off from all humanity, whether powerless at work to hire a quality Art Director due to Lane's budgeting edicts, shorn of his soul-mate elementary school teacher, estranged from Betty due to his tangle of dishonesties, unable to connect with Roger at the wedding thanks to his previous resentments. Roger is also finding himself isolated, with his young wife acting childish and denying him a grown-up partner, reaching out instead to Joan who now lives on the show's narrative margins, she the most capable adult of all.
The episode begins with Pete asleep and ends with Don anesthetizing himself yet again, having come to the office with no other place to go on the sudden National Day of Mourning. Pete wakes up over the course of the episode but Don ends it hitting the bottle, sticking with his dream state. Don finds Peggy also at the office and the two of them are kindred spirits, both alone in their own ways, survivors who can take the events of the week in greater stride than others due to their own traumatic experiences, but Don is still unable to make a complete connection. He's too full of grief from Betty's declaration of no longer loving him, too isolated by the role he's built for himself in terminal pursuit of the American Dream. Peggy goes off to watch the funeral in Bert's office while Don returns to the shadows that are the dominant visual for him this week, once again trapped visually in a doorframe, reaching for the bottle. It's obvious by now that Don is an alcoholic, and that it's as much a trap as his adopted identity, company and marriage.
The rebels, the ones more alive now, are in cells of two, a foreshadowing of the 1960's political cells to come -- the ones committed, sometimes violently, to creating change. While the Beatles will be important culturally should the next season pick up in 1964, it's five more years until the next big hits, when both Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy fall from assassin bullets within two months of each other, by which time the more festering trauma of the Vietnam War will be tearing our nation apart.
The question for the season finale is whether we'll see Don Draper somehow rising to the occasion and pulling back together the threads of his life at home and at work, as he's done with varying degrees of success in each of the previous two seasons. Is the change creator Matthew Weiner has touted all season is a permanent trajectory or simply a more sophisticated form of standard television series machinations? Will Betty discover Henry to be a fraud and return home to Don? Will Joan return as Office Manager and Sal as Art Director? Will Pete someone get over on Ken and take the top account position? Will Peggy and Don unite to become a team again?
From the very beginning the big vision and big promise has been depicting the decade of greatest, most rapid change in modern American history, at least since the Civil War one hundred years earlier. If, as Weiner has said, Mad Men is a show about "not getting what you want," then the potential for real dramatic and potentially structural change must be met. Especially the week after so convincingly depicting the historical earthquake that began on November 22, 1963 at 12:30pm CST in Dallas, Texas.
We'll all be watching.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Cautionary Tales
Sure, there's the cautionary tale of Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) from yesterday, but it doesn't compare to the three celebrities that made this week's fated troika. I'm referring, of course, to Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson.
I had the pleasure to meet McMahon on the tail end of a flight to Vegas several years ago. Very affable, total gentleman. However, his dream career in Hollywood, the massive job security of sitting next to Johnny Carson on the couch year after year, had a dark ending turn well, when he suddenly found himself in big financial debt very late in life, after the good earning years (and they lasted longer than for most folks) were up. The moral: live modestly enough that you don't get nailed when the high-flying plane to Vegas comes down.
Ms. Fawcett had another path to caution. Blessed with a contemporary beauty and the sparkle to go with it, she sold 12 million posters and was a TV sensation...for a single year. After she sprang herself prematurely from her Charlie's Angels contract she admirably sought bigger, smarter, tougher roles and got a few of them, but it was struggle from thereon out, culminating with a late career lunge and sex symbol reprise and embarrassing drunken or pilled-out moments on Letterman and elsewhere. Whereas McMahon seemed to coast along the mega-capitalist entertainment system, Fawcett was more or less treated like a bauble, albeit one who gamely strove for better. So the moral might be to have a contingency plan when the system no longer needs you.
Which brings us to the Prince of Pop, or King, or gravy train for all those music and television executives who got their piece of Michael Jackson's never-to-be-duplicated package of talent. In Michael Kinsley's prescient 1984 piece on the cost of Jackson's success and it's place within the Hollywood system, he recaps the debilitating nature of Jackson's showbiz childhood -- rarely if ever in school -- and how those benefiting most from the system needed to keep him in Neverland to keep earning big:
It's all a bit reminiscent, particularly in Jackson's case, of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, the originally underground classic compendium of celebrity horror stories stretching from the Fatty Arbuckle silent era scandals to Jayne Mansfield's grotesque auto accident decapitation. Anger gave us the extreme version of those "the rich are unhappy" parables meant to keep the rest of us content with our lot, but one has to wonder if the three who just died would have been any happier without the fame. Didn't they need it to survive, like oxygen? McMahon laughing at the boss' jokes down at the local bar? Farrah as a small town mom? Jackson as a grade school teacher without the protection of wealth?
Okay, next three?
I had the pleasure to meet McMahon on the tail end of a flight to Vegas several years ago. Very affable, total gentleman. However, his dream career in Hollywood, the massive job security of sitting next to Johnny Carson on the couch year after year, had a dark ending turn well, when he suddenly found himself in big financial debt very late in life, after the good earning years (and they lasted longer than for most folks) were up. The moral: live modestly enough that you don't get nailed when the high-flying plane to Vegas comes down.
Ms. Fawcett had another path to caution. Blessed with a contemporary beauty and the sparkle to go with it, she sold 12 million posters and was a TV sensation...for a single year. After she sprang herself prematurely from her Charlie's Angels contract she admirably sought bigger, smarter, tougher roles and got a few of them, but it was struggle from thereon out, culminating with a late career lunge and sex symbol reprise and embarrassing drunken or pilled-out moments on Letterman and elsewhere. Whereas McMahon seemed to coast along the mega-capitalist entertainment system, Fawcett was more or less treated like a bauble, albeit one who gamely strove for better. So the moral might be to have a contingency plan when the system no longer needs you.
Which brings us to the Prince of Pop, or King, or gravy train for all those music and television executives who got their piece of Michael Jackson's never-to-be-duplicated package of talent. In Michael Kinsley's prescient 1984 piece on the cost of Jackson's success and it's place within the Hollywood system, he recaps the debilitating nature of Jackson's showbiz childhood -- rarely if ever in school -- and how those benefiting most from the system needed to keep him in Neverland to keep earning big:
What's happened to Michael Jackson isn't too different from what they used to do to young male singers in Europe a few centuries ago, to keep their voices sweet. In another way, it resembles the exploitation of child stars like Judy Garland in the heyday of the Hollywood studios. In fact, what American capitalism has done to Michael Jackson is even a bit like what the Soviets do to their women athletes.So a contemporary of my generation and just a few years older than our President, who's just hitting his stride, burns out nearly twenty years after his heyday in what is sounding like a Heath Ledger prescription drug abuse tragedy. Of all the cautionary tales, Jackson's is the one that indicts others the most: his hard-driving stage dad, his enablers hired and percentage earners, maybe even the fans who love his music. The moral: grow up or die young. And mutilated....
Yes, I know, it's hard to feel sorry for Michael Jackson. Millions of dollars and zillions of adoring fans, a huge party in New York at which, says Rolling Stone, "a procession of CBS executives" rises to declare fealty. If he wants a duplicate of the Disneyland "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride built in his house (and he does), he can have it. But how many CBS executives or editors of Time would want their own child, at age 25, to want such a thing, to be babbling about misunderstood snakes, to be "like a fawn in a burning forest"?
It's all a bit reminiscent, particularly in Jackson's case, of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, the originally underground classic compendium of celebrity horror stories stretching from the Fatty Arbuckle silent era scandals to Jayne Mansfield's grotesque auto accident decapitation. Anger gave us the extreme version of those "the rich are unhappy" parables meant to keep the rest of us content with our lot, but one has to wonder if the three who just died would have been any happier without the fame. Didn't they need it to survive, like oxygen? McMahon laughing at the boss' jokes down at the local bar? Farrah as a small town mom? Jackson as a grade school teacher without the protection of wealth?
Okay, next three?
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Waltz to Peace
Clearly anticipating the start of the Obama Era on Tuesday and maybe hoping that by cooling off now they keep him as a friend, Israel has declared a unilateral ceasefire while keeping their troops stationed in Gaza. While I commend the ceasefire and understand that it made more sense for them to do it themselves rather than as the result of negotiation with Hamas, I don't hold much hope of it lasting. Hamas or some Palestinian whose family has been killed by Israeli bombing or gunfire will strike, Israel with strike back...we've all seen this dance before.
I don't have the intestinal fortitude to get into a huge discussion of Israel re-occupation of Gaza, as I have my own conflicted feelings about it. On one hand, Hamas is an Iranian-backed terrorist/political organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel, and they clearly brought this response upon themselves by firing rockets at Israeli home in violation of the previous ceasefire or perhaps to take advantage of its end. Israel, on the other hand, attacks Hamas where they have embedded themselves with regular citizens already living in degraded conditions due to the control of the border by Israel, bringing holy hell down upon many innocent people along with the more guilty.
It is in this context that Waltz with Bashir arrives with so timely a release, a view from the Israeli side that is fraught with guilt, pain, and a clear plea for the end of violence against civilians. It is the story of a former Israeli soldier (service is, of course, mandatory for all Israeli citizens with some sometimes galling exceptions) who is trying to recover his memory of events two decades earlier, when he was stationed by the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the incident when Ariel Sharon allowed the Lebanese Christian Phalangists, blood-crazed from the murder of their leader, Bashir, into the camps to massacre Muslim civilians -- men, women, children.
While such a soul-searching by a nation still under siege is remarkable, what makes the film even more remarkable and even unmissable is it's form. Made over the course of four years, Waltz with Bashir is an entirely new genre of film, the animated documentary:
Filmmaker Ari Folman is telling his own story, filming and rotoscoping his fellow veterans, creating a graphic novel on film that's somewhere between the very moving comic book reportage of Joe Sacco and the experimental Waking Life. Folman's vision is at times magical or humorous, but most of all it is relateable. By using the ostensibly distancing format he ends up drawing us closer, and sets us up for the tragic punchline of real footage, the kind that the most repressed memories are made of.
Here's to the candor and artistry of Folman and those like him who would seek to beat swords into ploughshares. As we stand poised on the edge of what so many around the world hope and pray is a new era, may their voices be those that are triumphant.
I don't have the intestinal fortitude to get into a huge discussion of Israel re-occupation of Gaza, as I have my own conflicted feelings about it. On one hand, Hamas is an Iranian-backed terrorist/political organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel, and they clearly brought this response upon themselves by firing rockets at Israeli home in violation of the previous ceasefire or perhaps to take advantage of its end. Israel, on the other hand, attacks Hamas where they have embedded themselves with regular citizens already living in degraded conditions due to the control of the border by Israel, bringing holy hell down upon many innocent people along with the more guilty.
It is in this context that Waltz with Bashir arrives with so timely a release, a view from the Israeli side that is fraught with guilt, pain, and a clear plea for the end of violence against civilians. It is the story of a former Israeli soldier (service is, of course, mandatory for all Israeli citizens with some sometimes galling exceptions) who is trying to recover his memory of events two decades earlier, when he was stationed by the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the incident when Ariel Sharon allowed the Lebanese Christian Phalangists, blood-crazed from the murder of their leader, Bashir, into the camps to massacre Muslim civilians -- men, women, children.
While such a soul-searching by a nation still under siege is remarkable, what makes the film even more remarkable and even unmissable is it's form. Made over the course of four years, Waltz with Bashir is an entirely new genre of film, the animated documentary:
Filmmaker Ari Folman is telling his own story, filming and rotoscoping his fellow veterans, creating a graphic novel on film that's somewhere between the very moving comic book reportage of Joe Sacco and the experimental Waking Life. Folman's vision is at times magical or humorous, but most of all it is relateable. By using the ostensibly distancing format he ends up drawing us closer, and sets us up for the tragic punchline of real footage, the kind that the most repressed memories are made of.
Here's to the candor and artistry of Folman and those like him who would seek to beat swords into ploughshares. As we stand poised on the edge of what so many around the world hope and pray is a new era, may their voices be those that are triumphant.
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