A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment

Rupert Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429947735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Inspired by the philosophy of Wittgenstein and his idea that the purpose of real philosophical thinking is not to discover something new, but to show in a strikingly different light what is already there, this book provides philosophical readings of a number of 'arthouse' and Hollywood films. Each chapter contains a discussion of two films—one explored in greater detail and the other analyzed as a minor key which reveals the possibility for the book's ideas to be applied across different films, registers, and genres. The readings are not only interpretive, but they offer a way of thinking and feeling about, with, and through films which is genuinely transformative. Rupert Read's main contention is that certain films can bring about a change in how we see the world. He advocates an ecological approach to film-philosophy analysis, arguing that film can re-shape the viewer's relationship to the environment and other living beings. The transformative 'wake-up call' of these films is enlightenment in its true sense. The result is a book that ambitiously aims to change, though film, how we think of ourselves and our place in the world, at a time when such change is more needed than ever before.

1
Implicating the Narrator, Implicating the Audience

Waltz With Bashir (and Apocalypto)

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

—Theodor Adorno

Waltz With Bashir: A political film, clearly.¹ But philosophical? How so? How am I saying that this film belongs in this book?

A first approximation would be: because it is a film about acknowledgement and/of reality. But to be able to answer the question properly, let me begin apparently less directly, by dwelling on some of the political criticism that this film has received.

The film is said by “Leftist” critics to be an apologia for the military adventurism of Israeli “liberal humanism,” a paean to the capacity of Israel to covertly pat itself on the back by means of self-criticism. It is said to be merely a therapeutic exercise for the continuing perpetrators of violence. It is said to involve a failure to humanize the Arab victims of the first Lebanese war. The film is also said by some, notably by Shohini Chaudhuri,² to be de politicizing: an indulgent, merely therapeutic fleeing from history and from political reality.

These are serious criticisms. By my means of refuting them,³ I will seek to reveal the sense in which the film succeeds in being a philosophical work.

The mode in which I will refute these criticisms might be unexpected. I don’t seek to refute them “head-on.” Indeed, I concede outright that there is a sense in which the reading of the film that these criticisms encapsulate is to some considerable extent a natural reading of the film. (What the critics are talking about is very much “in” the film; in something like the same way that the picture-picture of meaning is “in” Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.⁴ The question is whether this presence is simply the promulgation of a picture or view, or whether it turns out to be an indirect way of carrying out a profound criticism of that view. In the case of the Tractatus, most of what is “in” the book, within the “frame” of the book, is profoundly criticized, and overcome, by its end.)⁵

Clearly, some Israelis themselves saw the film in this way; that is, as almost a sort of celebration of Israeli military history. The very things that the critics homed in on appear to be the very things in the film that many of the film’s more jingoistic fans/supporters welcomed. I accept that it is possible that the film has by and large had this kind of effect. Just as it is possible that the effect of Pink Floyd’s The Wall was to license an attitude among a generation of schoolkids to the effect that education was (is) evil. But that reading of the Alan Parker /Pink Floyd film was at best a gross over-simplification, at worst a complete failure to understand the film (which was rather a critique more specifically of schooling, in something like Ivan Illich’s sense of that word,⁶ and more generally a critique of hierarchical mass-conformism). A fortiori, while it may be true that Waltz With Bashir has been widely “understood,” by foes and fans alike, to be an apologia for Israel,⁷ that does not prove that that is the right way to take the film. And I shall explain why it is not.

What exactly do I mean by saying that it is to a fair extent nevertheless a “natural” reading of the film? Well, the film is made, starkly, from the Israeli point of view. One never hears an Arab speak in the whole animation; the Arabs in it are mostly just bystanders, enemies or victims/cannon-fodder. The film is absolutely explicitly a search for therapy and memory and personal peace on the part of Israeli ex-soldiers, especially the protagonist. I “concede” all of this. Much more than that: I claim that this is precisely how the film does its work.

In this regard, Waltz might be helpfully compared to In the Company of Men: a film which proceeds strikingly from the male (masculinist, macho) point of view, which it inhabits explicitly, relentlessly and unpleasantly. It would be a profound failure of vision to understand that film as a celebration of male domination, when it is the very opposite. The claim that I shall make about Waltz With Bashir is similar.

(Incidentally, it follows from this that the “Bechdel test” for determining whether a film is sexist is at best an oversimplification with limited scope of application. In the Company of Men would fail the Bechdel test, just as Waltz With Bashir would fail a similar test vis-à-vis Orientalism /taking Arab voices seriously. But what I have just shown is that any such test is blind to the possibility that a film is a worthwhile—and perhaps devastating—critique of the oppressors’ worldview, from the inside. Most of the films in this book in fact fail the Bechdel test [the only exceptions are Melancholia and Never Let Me Go]. I think that that proves that the test itself fails.)

Chaudhuri observes correctly that “The way [Waltz With Bashir] maps space is through the aggressor’s perspective, through the grids of power, surveillance and control.”⁸ Well yes, indeed: How is one going to dismantle the self-exculpating mindset of aggressors more effectively than by means of inhabiting it from the inside and bringing to full self-consciousness the horror of it, when it is brought face to face with its results?

Chaudhuri continues: “Carmi [one of the protagonist-filmmaker’s fellow soldiers]… relates how he and his comrades used to fire indiscriminately, at whom they knew not. In the visualized recollection, they continue shooting relentlessly when a Mercedes comes into view, riddling it with bullets until the door opens and a dead Arab flops out.” Yes indeed; the film shows starkly Israeli responsibility for criminal killings of civilians, and evokes the dehumanization that made this possible. Weirdly, Chaudhuri seems to think this (scene) some kind of would-be exculpatory celebration of unreasoned almost genocidal violence, when it is quite plain that the scene in question is putting in your face the nature of this dehumanization: all animated, all “deniable,” but all (too) real.

“Suffering is not really suffering when it is drawn in lines,” asserts Gideon Levy.⁹ Yes, indeed: it is easier to take it as somehow fictive, or as somehow not deep or human suffering. That’s the point. The film, I will claim, is an animation because it aims to convey the semi-wilful suspension of belief/acknowledgement that enabled Israel to do its dehumanizing “work” in Lebanon. It aims to manifest to us the lived “acid trip” experience of a war whose wagers were trying to make it somehow deniable, uncriminal. The film’s critics think that the film is an animation so as to be able with finality to deny the humanity of the oppressed in it. A more complete misunderstanding of the film would be hard to imagine.

So, indeed, the film, through virtually its entirely length, precisely and deliberately fails to humanize the quasi-generic victims who are most appallingly and casually dispatched. It does this, in songs like “I Bombed Beirut Today,” with a knowing nod to Apocalypse Now; it foregrounds the willingness of the Israelis to delight in killing and to be carefree about “collateral damage.”¹⁰

Chaudhuri notes the link to Apocalypse Now, but, incredibly, fails to see this as evidence of Waltz With Bashir’s clear intention to denounce rather than to celebrate the apocalypse wreaked by aggressors (then, the American invaders; now, the Israeli invaders). Instead, she remarks that the sequence in question “inadvertently conveys the sheer arrogance of the war: Lebanon is reduced to a playground where Israeli soldiers can indulge their libidinal fascinations with their war machines.”¹¹ As so often in her essay, Chaudhuri here gets things just about exactly right, EXCEPT for the crucial fact that she claims, bizarrely, that the effect is “inadvertent.” The film is shot through with war crimes, with innocent Arabs needlessly and wilfully shot through, and it centrally concerns the protagonist’s emerging and finally clear guilt at all this: How can this possibly be “inadvertent”??

The film follows intently the protagonist’s and his former colleagues’ potentially self-indulgent but profoundly understandable—in most cases, their minds, their souls are not at peace, because of what they have done, because of what they are guilty of—search for personal peace in the wake of all this. What it finally enables us to understand is how this search will be fruitless unless one actually wakes up to and starts to actually come to terms with one’s status as a guilty party, as a perpetrator, as a collaborator with the kind of horror in fact that was inflicted on the Jews in the Holocaust.

What the film shows us, searingly, is how the Israelis that it depicts saw— or rather, for far far too long failed to see—those that they oppressed, senselessly murdered, committed to torture and death at the hands of their allies etc. The film shows us the routine nature of Israeli war crimes, the total complicity with the greatest war crime of them all in that war (Sabra and Shatila)—and the unwillingness to see/acknowledge these things. It takes the need for therapy on the part of traumatized Israeli victims and shows how, at least in the case of Folman himself, this need was itself a product of that unwillingness. Folman can’t remember what happened to him during the war, and especially at Sabra and Shatila—because he can’t bear to see what he did. Who he was. What he was a part of. Only a long and increasingly painful (but also potentially/ultimately liberating)¹² journey enables him to see (this).

The film explicitly and precisely concerns the tendency to dissociate, to treat what one is doing to others as merely something that one is watching. Again and again the film shows us soldiers inclining to view the war as if it were a spectator sport, or a film.¹³ Just as one can watch a film, and think that one is simply “escaping.” Such a false fantasy of freedom is precisely what the book of mine that you are reading is designed to oppose. Waltz With Bashir subjects one to (a) more uncomfortable reality.

Consider in this connection Gideon Levy’s influential criticism of the film:

This is an extraordinarily infuriating film precisely because it is done with so much talent. Art has been recruited here for an operation of deceit. The war has been painted with soft, caressing colours—as in comic books. Even the blood is amazingly aesthetic, and suffering is not really suffering when it is drawn in lines.¹⁴

But the point of the film, on the understanding of it that I’m developing here, is exactly to lull the audience into those soft caressing colours, that aesthetic. To get them (us) to be (too) comfortable in a world drawn in lines. And then gradually to realize, especially at the close (‘at the death,’ as one might helpfully put it), with a horror of recognition and criticism at oneself too for having been complicit with it,¹⁵ how one has gone along with a dehumanization, or “Orientalization,” of the Arab victims.¹⁶

This is the beauty of the shift in register in the closing scenes of the film (that I’ll discuss in detail below). Point-of-view shots are used in the film periodically, but none more powerfully than those with which it closes. We see as if we were the Palestinian women streaming out of the camp, Folman standing before us; and then we flip around to see from his point of view, almost literally: as the camera held by an Israeli documents the reality of the women’s extreme grief at the extraordinary crime that has just been perpetrated against them.

Thus the biggest criticism of all made of the film, that it allegedly involves a failure to see Arabs, that it can’t even take them seriously enough to depict them as other than cartoon characters, is in the end the very inverse of the truth. The film is not an instance of that failure; it is precisely an uncovering of all such failure. Up virtually to the very end, one could potentially make that criticism, at a great stretch, but at the very end, with the irruption of reality onto the screen,¹⁷ the rug is pulled from under one: suddenly, one comes in full colour to see the failure to see the other that has been endemic throughout the film. This is flashback with a vengeance: this is suddenly true documentary as opposed to quasi-fictionalized/“animated” documentary.

This is why the film was made as an animation: because of the way that it is designed to midwife a “therapeutic,” liberatory journey through the danger of pseudo-acknowledgement to the moral truth and real acknowledgement. The film, as an animation, evokes in its very warp and weft the dissociation from reality that the film repeatedly thematizes as a feature of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and as a basis for the trauma that the surviving invaders went on to suffer from. The soldiers at the time were detached from the reality of what they inflicted, saw and endured; and this effect is only heightened in retrospect, in the suppression of traumatic memories and guilt.

This surreality or derealizatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Film as Freedom: The Meaning of Film as Philosophy
• 1 Implicating the Narrator, Implicating the Audience: Waltz With Bashir (and Apocalypto)
• 2 How to Represent a Past One Would Rather Forget: Hiroshima Mon Amour (and Last Year in Marienbad)
• 3 Learning From Conceptually Impossible Versions of Our World: Never Let Me Go (and The Road)
• 4 When Melancholia Is Exactly What Is Called For: Melancholia (and Solaris)
• 5 Gravity’s Arc: Or Gravity: A Space Odyssey
• 6 The Fantasy of Absolute Safety Through Absolute Power: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (and Avatar)
• Conclusion: What Have We Learnt?
• Index