Football with Bashir

An interesting thing about collective memory is that there are times when individuals forget or remember things at the same moment. An event that actually happened can be forgotten or it can even be erased from one's past. Concrete becomes a dream when history can be re-written. It is possible to re-write history as long as people want to believe.

Football is a very good example for this discussion. Most individuals do not remember how and when they learned the rules of football: Were they small children thought by a father or had they a sports teacher in their school educating them? It is quite difficult for people to get an answer for these types of questions; questions about our past that have traces of certain events but not an actual data. Time goes by, and as people change, their emotions about their past change. This affects their ability to write about past dramatically. History is full of facts that contradict with each other but the important detail here is that there is a collective memory that that appears in people’s minds although there is no indication that this memory relates to truth.

Waltz with Bashir is quite successful in questioning the effects of trauma on both human psychology and memory. An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict. Director Ari cannot remember a certain period of time in his past and at the end of the interviews he conducts, he finally finds out that he actually took part in the massacre of Palestinian people. Although 99 percent of it is a rotoscope animation, film relies heavily on historical facts about the invasion; at the end, we are left alone with documented results of Sabra and Shatila from a news archive.

Although it is quite a crucial discussion area, history and the re-writing of it in individuals’ minds leaves us no other choice than to be skeptical towards facts. Power circles that aim recreating history and trauma that opens minds for such manipulations are few details that need to be unforgettable.