Director Ari Folman’s animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir (2008), was largely embraced for how it reconfigured the ethics of the non-fiction film and heralded an important new discourse for the animated genre. As implied by the film’s hybrid format and Folman’s focus on the tragic Sabra and Shatila massacre during the 1982 Lebanon War, Bashir posits the hypothesis that the animated image, in a documentary context, can function as an appropriate medium for representing that which is often deemed unrepresentable: the trauma of war and human suffering. Focusing on trauma studies and representation, with an eye towards the history of animated documentary in its many incarnations, this paper endeavors to study the function of the documentary’s animated image as—in Andreas Huyseen’s assessment of Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale—an act of mimesis as “distanciation device,” that “preserves the legitimacy of the image… in the faithful pursuit of its prohibition.”
About the presenterJoseph Kraemer
Kraemer is a filmmaker, media artist and educator. He received his MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University. His work has exhibited in festivals, conferences and galleries across the U.S., including Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. His scholarly writings have won numerous awards including First Place in the University Film and Video Association’s Paper Prize for two years running, from 2013-2014. He works professionally as a director, cinematographer, and sound designer.