waltz with bashir

Paul Byrnes, reviewer
September 10, 2008

WALTZ WITH BASHIR is a brilliant piece of work and I never want to see it again. I'm not sure that is the reaction that Israeli writer and director Ari Folman was aiming for, but it could be.

This is a traumatic film about trauma. It is intended as a war film that will make no one want to join up. That is itself against the tradition of war films, most of which are built on the feeling that war is hell, but soldiering is glorious. Waltz With Bashir has none of that. It takes away all the conventional excitement that make young men think going to war might be fun.

The movie does not offer a side to cheer for; there are just soldiers and civilians, some of whom die. There are no scenes of heroism, no battles to enjoy (what we see are more often short, chaotic and terrifying skirmishes, many of them tragic mistakes). Instead, we enter a series of clouded visions, shaky memories and tortured dreams. This is about aftermath, putting the broken bits of memory back together.

Did I mention that it's animated? That's part of the brilliance. Folman could never afford to make this as live action, but animation makes everything possible - even documentary. That is what this is, sort of: a feature-length, animated personal diary that is also a documentary about the memories of Israeli men who fought in Lebanon in 1982, one of whom is Ari Folman.

All of the stories are about memory and forgetting, and most of them lead to the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, on the outskirts of Beirut. Here, on September 15 and 16, 1982, Christian militiamen massacred somewhere between 700 and 3500 Palestinians, while the Israeli Defence Force allegedly looked on. That last statement is disputed, but the movie includes an interview with an Israeli soldier stationed at the gates of Shatila that night, who says they knew what was happening and tried to pass it on.

Folman also talks to the Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai, who says he called the then defence minister, Ariel Sharon, that night to say he had credible reports of massacres in the camps. "Did you see it yourself?" Sharon asked him. "No," said the reporter. "OK, thanks for bringing it to my attention," he says Sharon replied, before hanging up.

Folman makes his own memory - or lack of it - the core of the film. In the first scene, he and his friend Boaz Rein-Buskila are having a drink in a bar in Israel in 2006. Their figures have been photographed and then animated, so they look real but painted in deep primary colours. Boaz wants his help to understand a disturbing dream he keeps having, about their time in Lebanon in 1982. Ari says he never thinks about the war; his memories are virtually non-existent. "But you were there, near to Sabra and Shatila," says Boaz, estimating that Ari was only about 100 metres from where the massacres took place. Folman corrects him - no closer than 200-300 metres, he says. That makes you wonder how he could both remember and forget at the same time.

In a way that's what the film is about - the difference between forgetting and repressing, between traumatic amnesia and the kind of conscious manipulative self-deception in which responsibility is avoided. Which of these is driving Ari Folman, I wondered: did he really have no memories of 1982 in Lebanon, as he says, or is that his way of getting into this story? And does that matter in a film that's a form of documentary?

I am still not sure, because this movie doesn't easily give up its secrets. That's one of its ideas - the truth is hard to get to.

Folman talks to other soldier friends about their memories His conversations are intimate, rather than journalistic. He also talks to a post-trauma specialist, who explains the tricks the mind can play, and a smart friend who tells him that memory is dynamic and alive. Folman is worried that he will discover things he does not want to know about himself. "Memory tells us where we need to go," his friend, Ori Sivan, says.

In each conversation, we see an animated version of the real person talking to Folman before the movie takes off into a recreation of the story they wish to tell. Some of these are traumatic, some astonishing, but each is an imaginative tour de force: poetic, nightmarish, searing. It's not always clear whose memories we are entering, but a sense of chaos is somehow appropriate.

Folman has said the movie is non-political. That is true, in the sense that it is abstracted. You will not get a very clear sense of the politics that led to the murder of the Lebanese president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, in a bombing in 1982. You do get a clear sense of the violence that his death unleashed. And in case we might feel that animation blunts the reality of that violence, Folman switches at the end to actuality of the camps, the horrendous footage taken just after the militiamen pulled out. In that sense, the movie is very political, especially in Israel, where it would instantly evoke memories of other camps. As I said, the movie is traumatic, but also original, demanding and rewarding.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/09/10/1220857629395.html

the memory palace of matteo ricci by jonathan d. spence

In 1596 Matteo Ricci taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci tells this story. He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember: the most ambitious construction would consist of several hundred buildings of all shapes and sizes; "the more there are the better it will be," said Ricci, though he added that one did not have to build on a grandiose scale right away. One could create modest palaces, or one could build less dramatic structures such as a temple compound, a cluster of government offices, a public hostel, or a merchants' meeting lodge. If one wished to begin on a still smaller scale, then one could erect a simple reception hall, a pavilion, or a studio. And if one wanted an intimate space one could use just the corner of a pavilion, or an altar in a temple, or even such a homely object as a wardrobe or a divan. your host, Matteo Ricci

In summarizing this memory system, he explained that these palaces, pavilions, divans were mental structures to be kept in one's head, not solid objects to be literally constructed out of "real" materials. Ricci suggested that there were three main options for such memory locations.

First, they could be drawn from reality - that is, from buildings that one had been in or from objects that one had seen with one's own eyes and recalled in one's memory.

Second, they could be totally fictive, products of the imagination conjured up in any shape or size.

Or third, they could be half real and half fictive, as in the case of a building one knew well and through the back wall of which one broke an imaginary door as a shortcut to new spaces, or in the middle of which one created a mental staircase that would lead one up to higher floors that had not existed before.

The real purpose of all these mental constructs was to provide storage spaces for the myriad concepts that make up the sum of our human knowledge. To everything that we wish to remember, wrote Ricci, we should give an image; and to every one of these images we should assign a position where it can repose peacefully until we are ready to reclaim it by an act of memory. Since this entire memory system can work only if the images stay in the assigned positions and if we can instantly remember where we stored them, obviously it would seem easiest to rely on real locations which we know so well that we cannot ever forget them.

But that would be a mistake, thought Ricci. For it is by expanding the number of locations and the corresponding number of images that can be stored in them that we increase and strengthen our memory. Therefore the Chinese should struggle with the difficult task of creating fictive places, or mixing the fictive with the real, fixing them permanently in their minds by constant practice and review so that at last the fictive spaces become "as if real, and can never be erased."

It was this general facility for remembering the order of things that had been elaborated into a system over the succeeding centuries; by Ricci's time it had become a way for ordering all one's knowledge of secular and religious subjects, and since he himself was a Catholic missionary Ricci hoped that once the Chinese learned to value his mnemonic powers they would be drawn to ask him about the religion that made such wonders possible.

Pronounce mnemonic with a silent first letter.

the art of memory by frances a yates

In this classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page, Frances A. Yates' The Art of Memory traces the art of memory from its treatment by Greek orators, through its Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance, and finally to its use in the seventeenth century. This book, the first to relate the art of memory to the history of culture as a whole, was revolutionary when it first appeared and continues to mesmerize readers with its lucid and revelatory insights.

Yates' illumination of the profound relationship between the scientific method and earlier attempts at mastering the universe by magical means, that stands out as a single, most important aspect of the book.

Francis Yates has created a detailed examination of memory techniques and their evolution over the course of generations. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing through the Middle Ages, Yates shows how the art of remembering began as a sort of parlor trick and developed into an important skill in both religion and the occult.

In fact, this book has taken me in many different directions regarding memory: Loci, mnemonics, mnemotechnics, history, mysticism, magic, mathematics, Egyptology, alchemy. This book is very special because of the implications that a "art of memory" has on our history, and I believe in our future.

the art of memory: terence davies' distant voices, still lives by adrian danks

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988 UK 85 minutes) Terence Davies

Davies presents these vignettes as shards of memory which conversely contradict and rhyme with one another. The basic effect of this is to produce a complex emotional, social and familial landscape in which no character (not even the violent and unhinged father) is drawn simplistically or holistically. These memory images contrast and compete with one another to produce a range and ambiguity of character rare in such a fragmented and heartfelt autobiographical cinema. The effect is like that of memory stratified, where memory-images trigger other memory-images, creating a structure which seems to lack predetermination. Rather than an expected randomness a sense of wholeness, and a uniqueness of structure, emerges within which no compositions, expressions, gestures or snatches of music (flooding the soundtrack or defiantly sung by one of the film's many stoic female characters) seem out of place.

Distant Voices, Still Lives delves into the mechanics of memory (which it never conceives of as mechanical at all) and the mechanics and possibility of representing this memory in cinema. In the process it investigates the capacity of fictional cinema to act as memory book or family album. The film illustrates an important tension between evocative, realistic and tellingly detailed portrayal and the inaccessibility of the material portrayed to us (which can only be represented, distanced, voiced, stilled). Essentially what it offers is an emotionally charged self-conscious cinema throughout which we can sense the presence of the camera as it isolates an empty stairwell, cranes up from a sea of umbrellas, lingers over a composition, or perfectly frames and situates character within space. In the end Davies' film shows us duration, emotion, memory, the constructedness of space, and their interconnectedness.

This title is a homage to Frances A. Yates' fascinating book on mediaeval and Renaissance memory theatres. Davies' films can be seen as cinematic equivalents to such theatres (essentially spatialised systems or receptacles for memory and thought) in that they attempt to establish a model of memory as much as evoke a particular set of memories. His films can also be related to such memory theatres in terms of their mixture of the ephemeral (the memories themselves) and the material (the structures they are placed within). See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

Reference

purple china diary - the novel two

9 January 2008

Café in Harbin – Second Seeds of the Novel

Memory can be drawn as in Palestinian trauma victims – in different parts of the world memory can be elicited / freed / returned by different methods – dance, music, song, art, film – so also could memory be stored by the ‘memory keeper’ who can perform all these feats – do a dance, perform a song, show a film, perform theatre, recite a poem – the memory keeper is giving back all those things that have been culturally lost – the shark song of fiji all these things could be researched – the memory keeper goes on a journey [this could all be a bit crass] – the memory keeper does not know why she knows these things – she does not not who she is – she has lost her own memories – the journey restores this memory gradually – with each gift she herself receives something back – karma – ying yang – where to start – where to end – it is hard to know who she is – maybe she is Nicole – she can start with first stories in Canberra – pink can run through the book as a colour of fear – when she sees the colour she disassociates and it is at this point that she with ‘cultural artefacts’ – the memory keeper is complex, intelligent – story cannot be paternalistic – has to be subtle – subtle as a Taoist poem but as tough as a zen master – the acts of memory keeping are intimate and private - - ‘cross the river feeling the stones’ – if the book follows the poem must be found first – also correlation with desolation row – character a nineteen year old – inside like Nicole – who disassociates – character like john who reconstructs memories from auction artefacts – bits of film in memory – dada / surrealism – she is an artist

purple china diary - the novel one

7 January 2008

Night Train – The First Seeds Of The Novel

There is a book called The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

The memory keeper: The central character keeps memories as people can no longer keep them – the opposite of constructed memories as portrayed in Bladerunner – people are under stress like the loss of memory in Gabriel Marquez – there is not a loss of general memory as in One Hundred Years Of Solitude only a selective memory – a memory of certain things – this person travels around the world- travels as the angels travel in Hertzog’s Wings Of Desire – the person cures people by replacing ‘untrue’ memories with ‘true’ memories – she is the opposite of the communist collective propaganda and the Western propaganda of fear – her own history has to be very special – with a tremendous struggle for a zen moment which occurs in a very special place – Taoist stories could be used as a modern metaphor of the journey- it is a story of zen enlightment but not as pop as murikami – it is all about memory – loss of memory – cultural memory and the regaining and democritisation of memory – the liberation of being given the seed to grow again – each section could be marked by a chinese character with each character gradually making a poem – the enlightment of the poem thus ends with the enlightment of the novel – the novel can actually be constructed around the poem and characters – thus the need to go to china on writing scholarship – or other countries for that matter – a china/japan conjunction would be very interesting ! zen meets tao - the spiritual conjunction of the good cultural memory of each Nation – I can put everything that I have read and learnt into an individual knowledge and picture ‘trying to make my own melodies’ – Miles Davis – Mao says ‘crossing the river by feeling stones’ and Zhan Taiyan, the man who dismantled the peoples commune in 1980, said ‘practice is the sole criterion for testing the truth’

you're here to be salt seasoning

i come back to reconnect, in the persona of a believer - i have been lost and wandering like the lamb on the edge of the cliff - as i drive past bella vista waters estate everything now seems familiar and comfortable - i connect with the large impressive houses - see their symmetry and order, their power to project the wealth and success that the lord can bring into my life - i see that there are few trees but this is good as their is no covering up of the architectural power that is on full show - the grand houses look down on the hillsong centre announcing its importance, its central place in hillsong life - i park my car and walk up to the centre - past thousands of fellow worshipers who have attended the early morning service this special mother's day - indian, african, chinese, korean, american-african, anglo-european, everybody with smiles and kids in tow - i see sami a young samoan woman that i worked with a three years ago - she is with beautiful child and handsome samoan husband - sami is shocked to see me - delightfully surprised that i had finally found my way to the source - i am honest and tell her that i am writing a story on the hillsong experience - that it is a phenomenon - sami says that she hopes i don't say anything bad - i say no i am just telling a story - we talk briefly about debord's spectacle and she says, yes it is quite a show, and laughs - they are very happy and very warm - the child clenches my finger, connecting - they hug me and shake my hand, connecting - i am early for the service - i collect my mothers day hillsong present at the door - a hillsong capture the moment specially packaged instant camera, so that i can capture the moment of this special day of celebration for the legend mums - her children call her blessed - the word smile written in english, italian, spanish, french, nowegian, german - no chinese, islamic, african, indian, islander - i sit down in the same place as my previous visit but this time there is no girl with lost eyes but a thin Indian man with a look of shellshock - hardened, determined and solitary - there is a clapping, and the choir and musicians advance onto the stage - the singing starts - the giant images flash up on the three twelve by three metre screens - the congregation down on the floor start clapping, singing loudly and jumping up and down in a moshpit of love and surrender - a pop concert rapture of sublime connection - this is a spectacle of lights, sound and images - the slogan welcome home in two metre letters - better one day spent in the house, than a thousand elsewhere - worshipers, warriors, making a difference in our community, building for the future, placing value on womanhood, championing the cause of the local church, to love mercy - the music is loud, an accelerated syncopated drum beat that accelerates into excited revery then slows to beautiful reflection - a sweet smell of teenage spirit - the church is christ's body - what was once the bread, the natural sustenance that sustained life has been replaced by the structure, the building the church, my home - the singing strengthens with everyone raising one, two hands to connect to the lord - sing to the lord, great is our god - and there on the screen the lesson for today, the humble but bold message - YOU'RE HERE TO BE SALT SEASONING - of course, we are just the seasoning on the body of christ - our prayers and faith season the lord - add flavour to the body of christ - just like we add salt seasoning to our roast dinners cooked in our beautiful kitchens in our beautiful houses - bella vista - bella food - there is a loud roar and clapping and brian graces the stage - he talks of miracles and prayers - cancer, hemorrhages - cured - brian tells us that women are good at receiving and giving - they just get on with it - and now we should give - we have freely received and now we should freely give - cheques made out to hillsong are especially generous - generosity that transforms - small cute children of the congregation give big screen testimonials and presents are given out - even a darrel lea mothers day bag - we are shown more ads of future eventful events - this is all about the experience - all about the spectacle - we are coming for the event - the event is the rapture - the experience is the connection of experiencing the sublime feeling of the lord - wrapped up in a total environment where everything makes sense - there is no questioning, only acceptance, love and affirmation - pure concentrated energy directed at the worshipper - there is no dissent, no dialogue , no dialectic, no critical theory - only the answer - a positivist conversation - on the journey of faith - redemption is immediate and complete - the final prayer has come - those of us that have lost our way and need to reconnect are asked to raise our hands high in the air - i raise my hand - i feel the connection with the lord - i feel five thousand people praying for my salvation - i am redeemed - a bible is placed in my hand by david who is so happy that i have chosen the first step on a journey that will completely change my life - i am asked to enrol in a free 3-week course, RECONNECTION - david invites me back to the welcome lounge after the sermon - sharleen feeds me grapes and cakes and orange juice - tom welcomes me and tells me he was once a catholic - he belonged to a religion - but hillsong is not a religion - there are no rules and laws here to interfere - there is just a direct connection with god - david reconnected three yearss ago - two weeks later he closed his eyes and saw jesus standing with all the people david needed to forgive - david's wife just felt god's presence - i sip my gloria jeans coffee, i gulp down my grapes - i promise to return, to take up my new course, everyone smiles and congratulates me on my momentous decision - walking back i have accidently parked in the handicap parking space - thirty three miles from sydney and a thousand miles from care - manly and baulkam hills - i text my friend that i am safe - safe from what - safe from brian, safe from his wife bobby who i have never met, safe from robert, the used car salesman - safe from being being transformed into salt seasoning on the spoils of war - jesus loves me yes he does, why because the bible tells me so - the bible that was once called the bible now rests on my dashboard rebranded - abundant life new testament