When was the last time you noticed colour in a film?
Perhaps it’s been a while, because rather like perfect dialogue or sound design, the best use of colour is often characterized by it’s very unobtrusiveness.
In such cases, the cinematographer wants to nurture the illusion that you’re watching reality in all its winter grays and mud browns, not some gaudy approximation of real life. Even when colour is being used to parallel the emotional tone of a story, it will usually do so subtly, moving in undercurrents your brain hardly has time to register. We’ve come a long way from the hyper-real technicolor of The Wizard of Oz.
But rules allow their exceptions to work even more powerfully. The red coat of a little girl in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List plays a different role to the red coat of the girl in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now; the subdued grays of the Belgian steel town in L’Enfant make its heartbreaking plot all the more plausible. Steven Soderbergh, in his best film, Traffic, employs colour like an expressionist, shading his locations with starkly contrasting palettes – whether a Mexican border town, a middle-class Ohio suburb or a sordid drug den.
Certainly the award for most stunning use of colour in recent years should go to Waltz with Bashir, a documentary animation that was trailer of the week back in September. Having seen it last week I briefly felt tempted to ask the government to get a copy for every school and force children to watch it, like David Miliband did with An Inconvenient Truth. Though the truths told in Ari Folman’s film are not so much inconvenient as simply horrifying.
The opening sequence, in which a pack of snarling, slathering dogs chases through a city, is dominated by a burnt ochre yellow, a colour that sears itself into the film’s complexion and returns to haunt the film and its hero throughout. The same colour is later resurrected in the form of a set of flares erupting in the sky above Beirut. That sequence, in which the protagonist and his comrades rise slowly from an unnaturally placid sea and walk towards a burning city, is, like the opening, a nightmare; an example of the post-traumatic stress that provides the catalyst for the film itself. The extreme colour in some way signals to the audience that we are in a dream state, an effect heightened by the leaden, sluggish movements of the men, as if they are walking in treacle.
The filmmaker’s quest in Waltz with Bashir is to retrieve the memories of his time as an Israeli soldier during the Lebanon war of 1982. His journey proves utterly compelling, not only because it provides its own narrative momentum, as Folman pieces together facts and memories from comrades and eyewitnesses, but also because this quest is really a pretext for a far more universal urge: to understand man’s inhumanity to man, to unearth the place where darkness hides in the human heart.
While the quest itself is satisfying, its conclusion is perhaps inevitably less so. Much tragic art functions cathartically, leaving its audience feeling ultimately cleansed, allowing us to re-enact personal and collective trauma in a safe and controlled way. Folman’s canvas resembles the safe space of the psychoanalyst’s room, an environment in which he can explore and enact the original trauma in order to exorcise its power over his unconscious. Indeed at one point he actually interviews a psychiatrist, an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder.
But for the audience, Waltz With Bashir does not seem to offer such balm; perhaps it cannot. For although it wears the garb of a choreographed work of art, it is most importantly a documentary, and thus relies on real life, that most chaotic and unyielding of narratives.
The audience must live with an absence of closure because the lessons of the film – that violence is repeated; that massacres beget more massacres; that we cannot erase history – point so evidently to the horrors going unchecked in the world today – in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; in Darfur.
Aristotle said that tragedy was a process of imitating an action which “is complete”. He added, “A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles”. Essentially, the tragedy explored in Waltz with Bashir can never be complete while genocide occurs anywhere in the world. The fact that the trauma is therefore ongoing will always prevent catharsis.
But despite this, the film is a triumph. It is right that we should leave the cinema shaken and dumbfounded. It is the least we can do to acknowledge the suffering of the refugee victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the terrible cyclical nature of violence which has rendered the phrase “never again” so futile.
