One topic that we briefly discussed during yesterday’s discussion was the question of history. The representation of history is a key concern for documentarians, and many of these filmmakers (including contemporary ones) have struggled with the issue of how to show the past. In the History of Documentary course that I teach, this question of how to represent the past (particularly a traumatic past) always arises when we screen Alain Resnais’ reflection on the Holocaust, Night and Fog (1955). In Resnais’ case, he was faced with two problems in particular: how does a filmmaker portray an event from the past where (s)he was not present, and how can anyone adequately represent the horror of something that defies representation? While Ari Folman was not attempting to illustrate the Holocaust in Waltz with Bashir and he *was* present at the Sabra and Shatila massacres, I do see Folman’s film as grappling with the problems of how to represent the unrepresentable (in this case, the internal, the subjective, memory, trauma, dreams, and the psyche). What do you think - was Folman successful in his quest to represent the unrepresentable in Waltz with Bashir? Why or why not? What are the advantages and disadvantages of Folman’s utilization of animation to document emotion and history, and to illustrate the relationship between the past and the present?
