ABSTRACT
The animated film Vals im Bashir (Waltz With Bashir 2008) and the graphic novel based on it (2009), created by the director Ari Folman and the illustrator David Polonsky, deal with guilt, trauma, repression and the return of the repressed in dreams and hallucinations. Applying Jakobson’s notion of intersemiotic translation along with the Freudian conception of translation as a move toward greater consciousness, this chapter traces the narrator’s search for a lost memory. As a young soldier in the Israeli army during the 1982 Lebanon war, he witnessed the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and the memory, which has been repressed for many years, is gradually regained through dreams and hallucinations. Coping with the trauma, which is both individual and collective, is facilitated by the use of animation, an art form that avoids direct contact with reality. The film and graphic novel both end with documentary-like footage of the massacre, an ending that marks the completion of the psychological process.
