Friday, February 27, 2009
Review of "Waltz With Bashir"
[by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith]
Though the events illustrated in Israeli director and filmmaker Ari Folman’s extraordinary, animated documentary film, "Waltz With Bashir," occurred in 1982, in Lebanon, they are timely, considering Israel’s recent unleashing of its U.S.-backed war machine on Palestinians in Gaza.
Folman made his film in collaboration with art director David Polansky and director of animation Yori Goodman. Polansky and Goodman animate Folman’s narrative mostly in subdued tones, but also in saturated, surreal colors, and with the oblique, disorienting angles of a German expressionist film.
Some scenes could’ve been taken directly from recent documentary films on Iraq and Afghanistan. If anything, "Waltz With Bashir," illustrates the truism of the futility of war, that war never changes anything.
The film opens with a frightening, almost 3-D scene of an animated character, a friend of Folman, being chased by exactly 26 slathering, yellow-eyed Doberman Pinchers. This is a recurring nightmare the man has suffered for decades. He had been a soldier in the Israeli Army in 1982 when, under General Ariel Sharon, the Israeli army (IDF) attacked the Palestinians in Lebanon.
Folman also fought in the Lebanon war. He claims he doesn’t remember being in Beirut during the massacres of civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps of Shabra and Shatila, carried out by the right-wing Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia to avenge the assassination of their Lebanese president, Bashir Gemayel.
Folman decides to talk to former soldiers, who either knew about the slaughter or remembered being there with him. He also talks to psychiatrists about retrieving 20-year-old repressed memories.
The former soldiers Folman interviews (shown in animation) are middle-aged, and live comfortable lives as wine-makers, educators, doctors, or journalists. In the making of the film, all but two spoke in their own voices. With their help, Folman begins to remember firing flares that illuminated the night sky, providing the Phalangists enough light to execute their night-long slaughter.
He and the other soldiers are bothered by the stupidity of all that evil. Folman wonders how he could’ve allowed himself to be a part of it. Some of his memories come to him as breathtakingly beautiful hallucinations: Under palm trees on a beach, playing volleyball, listening to rock music, drinking, smoking weed—scenes reminiscent of film clips of American soldiers partying in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palace.
Some scenes are like a swift kick in the gut. The raw recruits have been ordered to "shoot anything that moves." They land on a beach, Normandy-style, and flop down in the sand, automatic rifles ready. These are baby-face boys, not much older than 19; eyes wide with the fear of the unexpected.
A broken down Mercedes sedan rattles up to the beach. Panicked, the boys start shooting. The car jumps and bounces with each strike, as the driver tries to pull away. The car then groans and settles like a dying beast. Then all is quiet. The soldiers approach gingerly, and see unrecognizable bloody ribbons of flesh that were once a family.
There was a question at the time as to whether Ariel Sharon knew of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Sharon had spent months planning the war. He had met secretly with Lebanese Christian Phalangist allies whom he planned to help install as Lebanon's government once the PLO was out of Beirut.
The IDF asked Phalangist militiamen to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The militia subsequently massacred civilians inside. Sharon’s culpability is illustrated in the film in a scene showing an Israeli journalist calling "Arik" (Sharon’s nickname) at his ranch, to ask him if he knew of the massacre. He answers, laconically, in the positive.
After the war, the Israeli government set up the Kahan Commission to investigate. It subsequently found Israel responsible, but only indirectly. The Commission stated that Israeli commanders should have been aware of the possibility of a revenge attack following Gemayel’s assassination. They also found Sharon personally responsible for not only "ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge" but also for "not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed." It recommended his resignation as head of the Defense Ministry. After first resisting, Sharon finally stepped down.
Comments on the film from some Arab blogs are positive. However, one blogger wondered why Arabs couldn’t make something similar. Another felt that Folman's film gives no answers.
In an interview, Folman told the JTA (The Global News Service of the Jewish People) he always intended to make "Waltz with Bashir" as an animated film: "When you look at everything that there is in this film—lost memory, memories of war, which are probably the most surreal things on earth, dreams, subconscious, drugs, hallucination—it was the only way to combine one fluid storyline," he said.
"If it was a classic documentary, it would have shown middle-aged men telling their war experiences and it would have to be covered with footage that you could never find and wouldn’t come close to resembling what they went through. It would be a boring film. And if you made a big action movie with the budget of an Israeli movie, that would just be sad."
In another view, Natalie Rothschild wrote on the Website JEWCY, in December 2008, that Folman’s film, though beautifully rendered and artfully scripted, is a big narcissistic mea culpa, a "spectre that haunts post-Zionist Israeli society." She calls the film, "Post-Zionist Stress Disorder."
She stated that though Folman believes his film is apolitical, it "conveys a disturbingly skewed account" of the war. Folman, she says, feels the IDF soldiers were "victims of circumstance," and that the film "is not only incredibly self-obsessed, it is also a striking evasion of responsibility."
She also quotes Folman on the atrocity as believing that the Christian Phalangist militiamen were fully responsible and that the Israeli soldiers had nothing to do with it. Rothschild states that as a 19-year-old conscript, he could say he was following orders, but now, as an adult, he "could recognize that several parties hold responsibility for what happened."
The final scene of "Waltz"" shows Folman standing before shrieking, grief-stricken Palestinian women, leaving the camps, and we see that he finally recognizes his part in the massacre. The horror is made real when the film segues from animation to archival footage of the devastated survivors of the camps. As the camera moves over the rubble, one is sickened by the corpses of brutally slaughtered men, women, and children. Perhaps Folman’s film attests to his and the perpetrators’ guilt; however, it may offer atonement, as well.
"Waltz With Bashir" has won several awards and an Ophir, Israel’s equivalent of an Oscar, and has been nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Though the events illustrated in Israeli director and filmmaker Ari Folman’s extraordinary, animated documentary film, "Waltz With Bashir," occurred in 1982, in Lebanon, they are timely, considering Israel’s recent unleashing of its U.S.-backed war machine on Palestinians in Gaza.
Folman made his film in collaboration with art director David Polansky and director of animation Yori Goodman. Polansky and Goodman animate Folman’s narrative mostly in subdued tones, but also in saturated, surreal colors, and with the oblique, disorienting angles of a German expressionist film.
Some scenes could’ve been taken directly from recent documentary films on Iraq and Afghanistan. If anything, "Waltz With Bashir," illustrates the truism of the futility of war, that war never changes anything.
The film opens with a frightening, almost 3-D scene of an animated character, a friend of Folman, being chased by exactly 26 slathering, yellow-eyed Doberman Pinchers. This is a recurring nightmare the man has suffered for decades. He had been a soldier in the Israeli Army in 1982 when, under General Ariel Sharon, the Israeli army (IDF) attacked the Palestinians in Lebanon.
Folman also fought in the Lebanon war. He claims he doesn’t remember being in Beirut during the massacres of civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps of Shabra and Shatila, carried out by the right-wing Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia to avenge the assassination of their Lebanese president, Bashir Gemayel.
Folman decides to talk to former soldiers, who either knew about the slaughter or remembered being there with him. He also talks to psychiatrists about retrieving 20-year-old repressed memories.
The former soldiers Folman interviews (shown in animation) are middle-aged, and live comfortable lives as wine-makers, educators, doctors, or journalists. In the making of the film, all but two spoke in their own voices. With their help, Folman begins to remember firing flares that illuminated the night sky, providing the Phalangists enough light to execute their night-long slaughter.
He and the other soldiers are bothered by the stupidity of all that evil. Folman wonders how he could’ve allowed himself to be a part of it. Some of his memories come to him as breathtakingly beautiful hallucinations: Under palm trees on a beach, playing volleyball, listening to rock music, drinking, smoking weed—scenes reminiscent of film clips of American soldiers partying in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palace.
Some scenes are like a swift kick in the gut. The raw recruits have been ordered to "shoot anything that moves." They land on a beach, Normandy-style, and flop down in the sand, automatic rifles ready. These are baby-face boys, not much older than 19; eyes wide with the fear of the unexpected.
A broken down Mercedes sedan rattles up to the beach. Panicked, the boys start shooting. The car jumps and bounces with each strike, as the driver tries to pull away. The car then groans and settles like a dying beast. Then all is quiet. The soldiers approach gingerly, and see unrecognizable bloody ribbons of flesh that were once a family.
There was a question at the time as to whether Ariel Sharon knew of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Sharon had spent months planning the war. He had met secretly with Lebanese Christian Phalangist allies whom he planned to help install as Lebanon's government once the PLO was out of Beirut.
The IDF asked Phalangist militiamen to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The militia subsequently massacred civilians inside. Sharon’s culpability is illustrated in the film in a scene showing an Israeli journalist calling "Arik" (Sharon’s nickname) at his ranch, to ask him if he knew of the massacre. He answers, laconically, in the positive.
After the war, the Israeli government set up the Kahan Commission to investigate. It subsequently found Israel responsible, but only indirectly. The Commission stated that Israeli commanders should have been aware of the possibility of a revenge attack following Gemayel’s assassination. They also found Sharon personally responsible for not only "ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge" but also for "not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed." It recommended his resignation as head of the Defense Ministry. After first resisting, Sharon finally stepped down.
Comments on the film from some Arab blogs are positive. However, one blogger wondered why Arabs couldn’t make something similar. Another felt that Folman's film gives no answers.
In an interview, Folman told the JTA (The Global News Service of the Jewish People) he always intended to make "Waltz with Bashir" as an animated film: "When you look at everything that there is in this film—lost memory, memories of war, which are probably the most surreal things on earth, dreams, subconscious, drugs, hallucination—it was the only way to combine one fluid storyline," he said.
"If it was a classic documentary, it would have shown middle-aged men telling their war experiences and it would have to be covered with footage that you could never find and wouldn’t come close to resembling what they went through. It would be a boring film. And if you made a big action movie with the budget of an Israeli movie, that would just be sad."
In another view, Natalie Rothschild wrote on the Website JEWCY, in December 2008, that Folman’s film, though beautifully rendered and artfully scripted, is a big narcissistic mea culpa, a "spectre that haunts post-Zionist Israeli society." She calls the film, "Post-Zionist Stress Disorder."
She stated that though Folman believes his film is apolitical, it "conveys a disturbingly skewed account" of the war. Folman, she says, feels the IDF soldiers were "victims of circumstance," and that the film "is not only incredibly self-obsessed, it is also a striking evasion of responsibility."
She also quotes Folman on the atrocity as believing that the Christian Phalangist militiamen were fully responsible and that the Israeli soldiers had nothing to do with it. Rothschild states that as a 19-year-old conscript, he could say he was following orders, but now, as an adult, he "could recognize that several parties hold responsibility for what happened."
The final scene of "Waltz"" shows Folman standing before shrieking, grief-stricken Palestinian women, leaving the camps, and we see that he finally recognizes his part in the massacre. The horror is made real when the film segues from animation to archival footage of the devastated survivors of the camps. As the camera moves over the rubble, one is sickened by the corpses of brutally slaughtered men, women, and children. Perhaps Folman’s film attests to his and the perpetrators’ guilt; however, it may offer atonement, as well.
"Waltz With Bashir" has won several awards and an Ophir, Israel’s equivalent of an Oscar, and has been nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Obama Throws Billions More to the Banks
[by Andrew Pollack]
On Feb. 10, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner broadly outlined the Obama administration’s rescue package for U.S. banks. He said that the new program would require collecting as much as $2 trillion from the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and private investors.
Geithner acknowledged that people in the United States have “lost faith” in financial institutions and the federal government. He pointed to the Bush administration’s bailout efforts, in which $350 billion was given away to the major banks, with virtually no strings attached. Geithner said, “The spectacle of huge amounts of taxpayer money being provided to the same institutions that caused the crisis, with limited transparency and oversight, added to the public distrust.”
Despite this admission, the Obama bailout plan includes a combination of new favors to capital. As requested repeatedly by Wall Street, it would include an agency to buy troubled assets; federal guarantees against losses to banks from these assets; and more government purchase of stakes in failing or failed banks.
Of the last option, the Washington Post warned that "the prices of bank shares are so low that the government risks owning these firms outright if it makes a major investment of taxpayer money." This, said the paper, runs counter to the ideological preferences of Obama and advisers, although they leave open the option of such "nationalizations" for banks "too big to fail."
Goldman Sachs estimated that a new "bad assets bank" would have to take $4 trillion in debt off the private banks’ hands. That would equal nearly 1/3 of U.S. GDP.
This new bailout comes in the face of a study released in late January showing that lending at many of the nation's largest banks fell in recent months despite the money received in the first bailout. Said Campbell Harvey of Duke University’s business school: "We dropped a huge amount of money and we have nothing to show for what we actually wanted to happen."
Despite White House pledges to use part of the new bailout to help homeowners and small businesses, the Post said other senior government officials and economists expect the bulk of the funds to continue going to banks.
The banking crisis is so deep that even some mainstream economists believe government ownership of a minority of stock will very soon prove inadequate: "The case for full nationalization is far stronger now than it was a few months ago," said Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "If you don’t own the majority, you don’t get to fire management, wipe out shareholders, to declare that you are just going to take the losses and start over.
"I would guess that sometime in the next few weeks, Obama and Geithner will have to come out and say, ‘It’s much worse than we thought,’ and bite the bullet."
But The New York Times reports that Obama is wary of such "nationalizations," not only for ideological reasons but also for fear that "if the government is perceived as running the banks, the administration would come under enormous political pressure to halt foreclosures or lend money to ailing projects in cities or states with powerful constituencies." This from the man who is being accused by Republicans of using the crisis to socialize the economy bit by bit!
Even fear of partial "nationalizations" has prompted predictions of investor flight or further bank cutbacks, as bankers fear that when Washington takes over one bank, the access of others to capital, or the value of their assets, will be correspondingly diminished, leading to the need for further bailouts.
Although they make this argument out of self-interest, not just banker greed, but more importantly, the laws of competition in an anarchic market lend such arguments a perverse truth. For socialists, this means that the only real alternative is 100% nationalization of all the banks, and their amalgamation into one public institution under workers’ control.
On Feb. 10, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner broadly outlined the Obama administration’s rescue package for U.S. banks. He said that the new program would require collecting as much as $2 trillion from the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and private investors.
Geithner acknowledged that people in the United States have “lost faith” in financial institutions and the federal government. He pointed to the Bush administration’s bailout efforts, in which $350 billion was given away to the major banks, with virtually no strings attached. Geithner said, “The spectacle of huge amounts of taxpayer money being provided to the same institutions that caused the crisis, with limited transparency and oversight, added to the public distrust.”
Despite this admission, the Obama bailout plan includes a combination of new favors to capital. As requested repeatedly by Wall Street, it would include an agency to buy troubled assets; federal guarantees against losses to banks from these assets; and more government purchase of stakes in failing or failed banks.
Of the last option, the Washington Post warned that "the prices of bank shares are so low that the government risks owning these firms outright if it makes a major investment of taxpayer money." This, said the paper, runs counter to the ideological preferences of Obama and advisers, although they leave open the option of such "nationalizations" for banks "too big to fail."
Goldman Sachs estimated that a new "bad assets bank" would have to take $4 trillion in debt off the private banks’ hands. That would equal nearly 1/3 of U.S. GDP.
This new bailout comes in the face of a study released in late January showing that lending at many of the nation's largest banks fell in recent months despite the money received in the first bailout. Said Campbell Harvey of Duke University’s business school: "We dropped a huge amount of money and we have nothing to show for what we actually wanted to happen."
Despite White House pledges to use part of the new bailout to help homeowners and small businesses, the Post said other senior government officials and economists expect the bulk of the funds to continue going to banks.
The banking crisis is so deep that even some mainstream economists believe government ownership of a minority of stock will very soon prove inadequate: "The case for full nationalization is far stronger now than it was a few months ago," said Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "If you don’t own the majority, you don’t get to fire management, wipe out shareholders, to declare that you are just going to take the losses and start over.
"I would guess that sometime in the next few weeks, Obama and Geithner will have to come out and say, ‘It’s much worse than we thought,’ and bite the bullet."
But The New York Times reports that Obama is wary of such "nationalizations," not only for ideological reasons but also for fear that "if the government is perceived as running the banks, the administration would come under enormous political pressure to halt foreclosures or lend money to ailing projects in cities or states with powerful constituencies." This from the man who is being accused by Republicans of using the crisis to socialize the economy bit by bit!
Even fear of partial "nationalizations" has prompted predictions of investor flight or further bank cutbacks, as bankers fear that when Washington takes over one bank, the access of others to capital, or the value of their assets, will be correspondingly diminished, leading to the need for further bailouts.
Although they make this argument out of self-interest, not just banker greed, but more importantly, the laws of competition in an anarchic market lend such arguments a perverse truth. For socialists, this means that the only real alternative is 100% nationalization of all the banks, and their amalgamation into one public institution under workers’ control.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Socialist Action Convention Pictures
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