The main protagonist is an artist who is jolted by the nightmares that are shared with him by a friend. He is made to reflect on the fact that he seems to have lost his memory, and this awakens a form of obsession that leads to undertake a journey. What is fascinating is that this is a deeply personal journey, and the languid motion of the animation contributes to this sense. The characters seem to be at times very static, as this is furthermore highlighted by lyrical scenes of detachment and what one character, a psychologist, would term "dissociative syndrome". This is the experience whereby a character separates himself from his surroundings and views his experiences as though through a distant lens, becoming in a sense a spectator.
These scenes of detachment are frequently very beautiful. There are scenes on a beach in front of deteriorated high rise buildings, where the night is lit up by the slow fall of flares that light up the characters who emerge from the water. There is also a fantasy sequence in which one of the soldiers has lost consciousness on the boat that is conveying him and other soldiers to Lebanon, and dreams of a giant, beautiful woman from the sea who takes him with her for a swim on the ocean, escaping what is certainly perceived as a situation of extreme danger. The sea is a symbol, as asserted by another friend, for feeling and emotion, but this is an association that is never fully explained. In particular, if is indeed noteworthy how the characters become passive as they are overwhelmed or, better yet, enveloped by this all-encompassing medium. They are seperated, and what seems to be happening is that they use it as a form of escape, as a means to bury that which is indeed most troubling.
If the absence of memory can be equated with a form of death, then this is something that is suffered by many of the soldiers as well. They become transformed by this experience, and they fall into a state of automatism, in which they carry out acts that will later have tragic consequences. The main act which is being investigated here, of course, are the massacres of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon by the Christian Falagist soldiers, an act to which it is asserted the Israeli forces were complicit.
It is ironic the parallels become this episode and other infamous episodes such as that of the Warsaw ghetto. It is precisely as if the descendents of the first became strangely inured and insensitive to the similarities which are, of course, quite compelling. There has been a loss of memory, and in this case, this reveals the way in which memory is malleable and fragile, stretching to serve other needs. Is is a subject that has become an obsession for myself as well, as I am forced to speculate on how memories change, and how they fail to truly preserve an accurate account of past experiences, much less invest them with meaning. This can be a very uneasy discovery, for it means that consciousness is never as stable an experience as we might have assumed, and it is also fraught with perils. The thread of continuity is a fictitious one, in which it is impossible to follow the true trail of crumbs, given that these crumbs don't precisely lead to noteworthy landscapes (the house of Hansel and Gretel) but also to the avoidance of other landmarks.
If we use memory to protect ourselves, it is an uneasy medium, like the ocean, that can also envelop us and submerge entire experiences until they are dredged up at the most innocuous moments, by seemingly random cues. It is a complex web, is it a subterranean matrix of ever-shifting tectonic plates, is it a web of associations that is ever being spinned in accordance with our own emotional needs. It is indeed a work of fiction, one that must needs be recollected and which assumes different contours at different moments of our lives. Memory is, indeed, another non-linear dimension that is takes the contours of another form of space-time.
In this case, the trail of memories leads to a shattering examination of the circumstances surrounding the massacres. It is indeed a tragic experience, in which the characters dissociated themselves as they refused to confront the need for immediate action to stop the mass killing of innocents, in which so many civilians were rounded up and systematically murdered. The chief characters seem to offer explanations for why they failed to act, and this is indeed an impulse that was shared by others who have been witness to tragic episodes, such as the German civilians who surely knew what was taking place as the Jewish community was being persecuted, or as, in more recent episodes in the tragic string of genocides and massacres, other communities were targeted. (I mention this because of the recent capture of the Serbian general Ratko Mladic, who is accused of having masterminded the mass killing of Bosnians during the 1990s.)
The film ends with actual footage of the Palestinian refugees as they are allowed to reenter their camp, after the massacre has come to an end. There are senseless scenes of people lying in bloody piles in destroyed houses, including as well many women and children. There can be no release from the guilt of this episode. Memory or, in this case, the lack of memory (amnesia) has acted as a complicit agent, and this film is an effort to combat this amnesia and restore a sense of true cohesion. The characters have finally stopped drifting.
Copyrights ORomero 2011
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