After discussing about media change and remediation at class, I remembered one of my favourite movies, “Waltz with Bashir” a 2008 Israeli film, written and directed by Ari Folman.
The movie tells the story of Folman himself, when he was 19 years old and a soldier of the Israel Defence Forces during the Lebanon War of 1982. He tries to reconstruct that period of his life through interviewing some of the friends he had during those years. With their help, he starts to remember his traumatic experiences as a soldier and his most feared memory: the massacre of thousands of Palestinians from the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp.
The film took 4 years to be completed, and it is an animated documentary mostly made by mixing Adobe Flash, classic animation and 3D. Besides animation, it also uses real archive footage of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. The film is a combination of real and surreal scenes, fictional images and historic events, testimonials and autobiographical memories, music styles, journalism, documentary and innovative computer graphics.
This remediation of media and styles create what immediacy and hypermediacy want to achieve: a feeling of reality. As a viewer, the animation of the movie and the movie itself starts to disappear gradually, creating an emotional inner effect and leaving you simply in the presence of the images portrayed: the horrors of war, the psychological damages of being a soldier, the devastating reality of dehumanization.
Remediation is the perfect medium for representing this painful and devastating real event in a a powerful, artistic, respectful and beautiful way.
REFERENCES
McLuhan, M., &Fiore, Q. (1967) The medium is the massage. New York: Bantam. (Excerpts)
Bolter, J.D. & Grusin, R.A. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass; London: MIT Press, pp.2-15 and 53-62
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