Memory: Multiple Waltz With Bashir

Memory is the act of remembering. It is a conscious thought or recollection of experiences. Retrieving memory is not as simple process. “Rather, the remembering subject actively creates the meaning of the past in the act of remembering. Thus, narrated memory is an interpretation of a past that can never be full recovered.” (Smith) If a recounted memory is never going to be exact interpretation of the past, then memory is an intangible quality that can be explain through a number of ways. For example, individual memory or personal memory is a direct experience that originates from a single person. A French socialist Maurice Halbwachs analyzed and attributed memories, creating the term collective memory; where memory is shared between multiple …show more content…
Folman’s quest relies on collective memory as he listens to the memories of fellow veterans in hopes of triggering his own recollections. The film also interrogates the dependability of memory through its daydream like tendencies filled in by imagination. The filmmaker narrates that he had a flashback of the wars after meeting a fellow veteran one night. The scene follows by a group of naked teenagers rise from the sea as sleepwalkers skulking toward the beachfront to clothed their bodies and explore the desolate cityscape. This extract represents an imagined memory, remembering events that never occurred, as the filmmaker’s imagination exaggerated the memory. Jeanne-Marie Viljoen describes that the film, “offers… a complex account of the nature of memory, its relation to ‘real’ time and space, other human beings and ‘realistic’ narrative representations of the same events.” By using his fellow veterans to insert their own selective narratives to fill the missing blanks of his memory, Folman created a realistic experience as confusing, yet genuine especially through animation. Another example where imagination blends with reality is from a scene where some of Israeli soldiers are doing mundane tasks juxtaposed with traumatic war games; like surfing during an airstrike, drinking a beverage when tanks are getting bombed and frying an egg on burnt remains of a car. The question is how much of this reality actually happened. There are moments where the director even states that to fill the blanks he used daydreams. (Strike) It is still Folman’s war story told through animation as a part of his experience of his journey. Imagination becomes a distortion of memory, but helping him form the narrative in a new