I cannot bring myself to talk to my younger brother of the war he had witnessed in 2000 and bring those memories back and I feel there is a part of him that I don’t know and cannot connect to. Waltz with Bashir, it feels,  allowed me to at least imagine some of the feelings he might have felt back then and bring us somewhat closer.

According to one of the creators of  Waltz with Bashir Ari Folman,  oftentimes even anti-war films end up glorifying war. I never thought of this but this is exactly what happens when I watch a movie that is supposed to show us the horrors of the war: there is always a hero overcoming the fear of death and saving others possibly at the cost of her own life and all that magic that film makers have at their disposal that makes even a war look like an adventure of one’s life time. Waltz, that is now both a graphic novel and a film, stripps the war off its glory.  What is left are raw feelings of fear, confusion, helplessness and when the hell is over a new one starts – years of nightmares.

It seems human memory needs to surpress the most painful episodes in order for us to go on and build something new. At least this is the case for Ari who finds himself oblivious of what he had seen and done but chooses to go back and reconstruct those memories, reconnecting to the 19 year-old he was and possibly bringing up the painful question of his own part in the events of the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila in the 1982 Lebanon War.

Sharing this film with just a few people in a tiny movie salong was a powerful experience.

When does a war end after the guns stop firing?

Here on Earth (audio) intreview with Ari Folman

Salon article  “What Waltz with Bashir can teach us about Gaza”

Words Without Borders interview wth David Polonsky, the artist behind Waltz with Bashir

My short visit to Russia made me nostalgic of the good old cartoons we grew up with in the former USSR. “Hedgehog in the Fog” (Russian: Ёжик в тума́не, “Yozhik v tumane”) was never among my favourates when I was a child: it had no songs in it, hardly any words at all and although the plot was straighforward I always had a feeling there was more to it only I couldn’t get it.

The stop-motion movie was made at Soyuzmultfilm by Yuri Norstein and his little film team in 1975.

The Plot

The little hedgehog is on his way through the woods to see his friend the bear cub with whom he fancies drinking tea and counting stars at night. He is so engrossed in the internal dialogue with his friend he does not notice following him huge owl. All of a sudden he sees a white hoarse in the fog and curious how it feels to be in there enters the fog. A new world unfolds before him, unpredictable and dangerous and he sees everything like for the first time: an oak leaf, a bat, a tree… As fog shifts, the scenery is transformed. The frightened little fella looses his the jar with the raspberry jam he was carrying to his friend but suddenly a friendly spaniel appears out of the fog and delivers the lost baggy.

This is not the end, though. Disoriented, the hedgehog falls into the river and at first tries to swim but soon gives up and decides to simply go with the flow and see where it gets him. The internal dialogue stops and he simply observes what he is dealing with – the sensation of being soaked and the possability of drowning. At this point he does not seem to be afraid of dying. When he accepts the reality of things, he hears a voice that asks him who he is and how he got there and honestly answers the question. The friendly Someone delivers him to the shore and the hedgehog soon gets reunited with his worried friend. Atlhough the hedgehog is relieved they are together again, he remembers the white horse and wonders: “How is she there… in the fog?”

The cartoon (subtitles in English)

Needless to say I watched the film with new eyes now, years later. We need to get lost in order to find that part of the self (the awareness itself?) , to accept the insecurity of shedding many other layer’s of the self. In the fog nothing is solid or clear any longer but this is the risk we have to take.

I was struck by the abundance of water-related imagery (well, water puddle, river, fog, whale/fish) which for me are associated in the first hand with Christianity. However, the idea of the healing powers of water goes back to the prehistoric cults. After his fall into the river the hedgehog gives up grasping for security and comfort of the known and his own understanding of the world. Isn’t what in Zen Buddhism we call “dropping off body and mind” when “things made up inside our heads fall away”?*

Turn off your mind, relax
and float downstream.
It is not dying ,
It is not dying.

(Beatles, “Tomorrow Never Knows”)

Did the hedgehog get baptised in the river or am I reading too much into it???

Other symbols:

peering into the deep well – searching for the true self (?)

fog - the ever changing scenery of life; the realm of our mind that interprets reality and makes it into something else depending on one’s emotional state (seeing a scary figure of an elephant in the fog)

tree -temporary sanctuary; security;

river – life; reality;

The animals the hedgehog encounters (owl, bat, moths, dog (the intuitive self), whale, are the other aspects of the self.

white horse – our radient essence, the pure awareness itself

By the end of the film the hedgehog is transformed by this experience. I can relate to what Dean Cleyuter writes in his “Cinema Nirvana” about the Snow White waiting for the Prince to find her: “Our inner nature wants, as it were, to be found. It’s not enough merely to be that luminous clarity; we must somehow come to know it. This knowing is not an idea or a feeling but a direct experience – in fact, the experience, satori, nirvana, rigpa, the peace that passeth understadning…”.

A charming little story, skillfully and beautifully told. I am glad I watched it again now, years later and experiences older. The fears remain basically the same, altough the scenery is changing. I now know better than believing the monsters are out there and you can actually run away from them from them. The fog is in my head.

*Kosho Uchiyama, “Opening the Hand of Thought”, 2004, p. 141.