Drawings, Photographs, and Notes from Nowhere

More here (if you are so inclined).

In his commentary on Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman says that animated drawings are no less real than movie images with actors. Folman talks about his experience raising money for the film. He went to a festival in Canada where he pitched the project to people from the industry. Almost everyone said that he should make a regular movie. Drawings, people thought, simply aren’t the real thing, and an audience wouldn’t be able to connect to them.

I am a hundred percent on Folman’s side. What’s so real about an actor, artificial lighting, a crew of technicians, and so on, and the resulting projection/pixels on a screen? Nothing. That kind of ‘reality’ was anyway never the point. What matters is reality in a different sense: images that evoke in people a connection with the experiences of others, a connection that enables them to see the world from someone else’s point of view, and to see that this point of view isn’t altogether unrelated to their own lives. Drawings, for me, can be very real, at least if they are done as in Waltz With Bashir.

Interestingly, the protagonists and even the minor characters in Waltz With Bashir are, in some sense, real people: they are friends and acquaintances and team members, video-taped and then drawn. But Folman didn’t simply convert video-tapes into animation. He took the characters and developed them. In his monochromatic color schemes, the characters become more rather than less real. Yellow is how hard it is to go through things. Orange is how wild and crazy it is. Blue is how much it might as well have been a dream. Or the other way around. Anyway, I continue to be a fan of Waltz With Bashir: five stars*****!

I watched Waltz With Bashir all over again, with Ari Folman’s commentary. There are so many things in the movie that speak to me, I decided I would ask Jens to make this into a little series on Notes From Nowhere.

Here’s one thing that interests me: the nature of flaws in art. In his commentary, Folman explains that the animation bears the signs of a low budget. Things don’t move in a natural way. This is less of a problem when rapid action is going on: even the limited animation they could afford will make it seem realistic. But when things slow down, bits of movement seem too rapid, too slow, too abrupt, too angular, and so on.

Before I listened to Folman’s commentary, I was certain that this effect was intentional. In my mind, the movie is a work of art, and I guess I don’t like the idea that anything about a work of art isn’t intentional — or rather, the idea that the unintentional isn’t somehow incorporated into the intentional. In the case of Waltz With Bashir, I would have thought that Folman wanted the dreamy, surreal atmosphere that emerges in slow-moving scenes. It doesn’t look real, but why should it? Isn’t this what the movie is about, that memory plays all kinds of tricks on us? There’s not just the phenomenon of suppressing traumatic events. There are also the manifold ways in which one can ‘remember’ things that never happened, in which images float through our minds, and in which the real and the imagined get mixed up with each other. If I could talk to Folman, I would try to talk him into embracing this feature of the movie more than he does… to be continued.