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Art therapy By Na'ama Lanski Tags: David Polonsky  What does a hallucination from the Lebanon War look like inside the head of someone with a black hole in his memory? Tormented young soldiers, naked as the day they were born, surface at night in the Mediterranean Sea, emerge slowly from the water and head toward the Beirut shoreline. The coast is lit up by a hail of illumination flares and, confusingly, resembles the Tel Aviv beach promenade. That's what the hallucination looks like. At least, that's how David Polonsky, art director of the year's most talked-about Israeli film, "Waltz with Bashir," saw it. "The [soldiers] are thin, almost withered, very vulnerable," Polonsky says. "Not far from them, the massacre at Sabra and Chatila is going on, but the hero, whose hallucination this is, is cut off from the events. Floating in the water. And everything is tinted in shades of orange and black." This hallucination recurs throughout the movie - troubling, oppressive - "until he can look at reality head-on and fill the void in his memory. And then the color orange will reappear, a lot of orange." The pain left by the memory of the war is central to "Waltz with Bashir," the animated documentary written, produced and directed by Ari Folman. The film reconstructs his persona as a 19-year-old conscript in the 1982 Lebanon War, and in particular tries to document his actions in relation to the massacre in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. Folman reached his insights following conversations with army buddies and interviews with experts on post-traumatic stress disorder as well as journalist Ron Ben-Yishai. Some of these people are illustrated in lifelike form in the film, while others are given a fictional semblance. Polonsky transformed the "quest into the director's memory for the missing pieces from the Lebanon War" - as the film's Web site puts it (www.waltzwithbashir.com) - into an expressive, highly original and powerful work of art. The film opens this week in local theaters. Advertisement The "Bashir" of the title is, of course, Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Christian Phalange in Lebanon at the time, and Israel's ally, who was later assassinated after being elected president of Lebanon. An Israeli soldier dances the waltz - in the form of bursts of automatic-weapons fire - with him in the middle of a Beirut street. Tellingly, the film concludes with 50 stomach-churning seconds of real footage of heaped bodies of Palestinians who were murdered in the refugee camps. Those 50 seconds were essential for Folman to convey the message that underlying the animation, which blurs reality and imagination, is a brutally real historical event. The creators of the film returned to Israel from the Cannes Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. Although "Waltz with Bashir" stirred tremendous interest at the festival, and earned high critical praise, it won no awards. Polonsky: "We did our thing big-time. This is a movie that was made in three rooms on 10-15 computers, and we got all the way to Cannes. The big difficulty was the huge buildup. I did not expect to win, and I even made a bet with someone that we would not win, even though almost everyone predicted that we would win some prize or other. All the media people and all the critics at the festival took a tremendous interest in us. Well, we were disappointed for a day, and that's really all. Sean Penn, the head of the festival jury, said our film would do well even without the prize, and that's true." Were you excited at the thought that you might win? "You go through upheavals at Cannes. From working in your little studio to being told by everyone that you're great. It's a lucky thing the festival was short and passed quickly, otherwise that kind of talk can go to your head and you start to believe it. Maybe not winning helped bring me back to reality." Painstaking work Polonsky, 35, was immersed in the project for three years and hardly had time for anything else apart from continuing to teach illustration and animation at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the Shenkar School of Engineering and Design. Even before starting work on "Bashir," he was one of Israel's busiest and most in-demand illustrators in the press and for children's books. His illustrations for "A Moonless Night," by Etgar Keret and Shira Gefen, won him this year's Israel Museum Award for illustration of a children's book. He first met and worked with Folman when he did five-minute "documentary animation" sequences that opened each episode of the director's television series "The Material that Love is Made Of." At Cannes, Folman, a highly regarded director, screenwriter and journalist, related that the idea for the film came to him five years ago, when he turned 40 and was accordingly exempted from future military reserve duty. At that time, he said, he was offered the opportunity to meet with an army psychologist once a week to tell his story, within the framework of a study conducted by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). After seven two-hour sessions, Folman realized that "this was the first time after 20 years that I had told my story to myself." The result was the onset of a psychological process of which the film was a part. "It was therapy," he says. "You do and do and do, instead of just sitting passively in treatment. This project helped me resolve a great many things within myself. It put me through a deep process that was simply amazing, a process of revelation and understanding. Suddenly you realize that you have treated yourself. That you have taken your story into your hands." How did the idea for an animated documentary originate? Folman: "The first time I tried this combination was in 'The Material that Love is Made Of,' but on a far smaller scale. That was when I met David, and the moment you start to work with David you can't stop. The concept of 'genius' has been cheapened, but that is exactly what he is - a genius. He is a world-class illustrator and super-intelligent in terms of his ability to adapt and adjust his artwork for cinematic purposes. We went through a lengthy process together, which became a close friendship, with many conversations about what we were creating. At first he found it difficult to take something so personal, something that came from me, and draw it. I haven't actually checked this, but I don't think there is another case anywhere of one illustrator doing 80 percent of a feature film, or devoting three years of his life to illustrate a story from someone else's life. It was very hard for me, too, because I can't draw. That limitation bugged me, until I realized that it is like working with actors who get my message across." The two hooked up with animation director Yoni Goodman and set up an animation studio for the project. The raw material was already there: after thorough research, Folman filmed a series of interviews with various people, and these became the basis for the illustrations and the animation. Polonsky dictated the entire design atmosphere of the film and illustrated most of it himself. (Illustrators Asaf and Tomer Hanuka, Michael Faust and Ya'ara Buchman also worked on the film.) What technique did you use? Polonsky: "It was not rotoscoping - that is, the illustrations for the characters were not achieved by tracing over Ari's live-action shots. The film Ari shot was only a general point of reference for the illustrations and the animation. We tried to imitate face and body language as much as possible." Isn't there an inherent contradiction between a documentary film and an animated film, in the sense that one is truth and the other fiction? Polonsky: "Every documentary film makes use of suggestive manipulation to get across the director's message. One example is shooting from a low angle, which makes the interviewee look more frightening. Our film is about memory and the lying nature of memory. The moment I draw someone's story, I emphasize the fact that it is not objective. There was another limitation in that two of the central interviewees did not want to be identified, and animation made it possible for us to create fictitious characters that were dubbed by professional actors." Every day, Polonsky's team of illustrators sent their work to Goodman's studio. Each illustration was separated into character and background, so that the character could be reduced to hundreds of particles, which the animators reassembled using a computer technique, thus creating a sequence of frames that give the film its motion. In some cases a character changed and was distorted in the course of movement, so Polonsky would go back and make corrections and adjustments. At this stage, Roiy Nitzan, the visual effects supervisor, entered the picture, and reconnected the characters to backgrounds, adding effects of smoke, dust, bombs, camera motion and color adaptation. "It was a huge amount of work," Polonsky says, groaning in recollection. "The first law of animation is just don't do it. It's too painstaking." How did you arrive at the style for the movie? "My feeling was that the artwork must not be highly stylized or highly present. I didn't think it was right to use very beautiful images in a story like this. The important thing was to create the right atmosphere, to get across a sense of what the events felt like. It was less important to convey exactly what things looked like than to capture and convey my feeling of what it was like." Were you ever in Lebanon? You were nine years old at the time of the first war. Polonsky: "I was never in Beirut or Sidon, so my depiction of them is almost entirely an invention. For the backgrounds - not the characters - I used parts of pictures, drawing on and around them. It interests me to know what viewers in Beirut will make of it. I was a bit bothered by this, but the excuse is that it's memory: you use building blocks, some of which are real and some of which are made up, but together they are arranged in a way that gives you meaning. For example, I was never on the coastal highway in Lebanon, but I have driven the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway countless times. So that is what appears in the film: the stretch of road between Zichron Yaakov and Haifa, with the banana groves, the color of the sky and the Israeli shoreline. I imagined the road I know best and overlaid it with an armored personnel carrier that spits indiscriminate fire. The important thing is for there to be enough associations and for it to be convincing enough to create the relevant emotional feelings. "I remember having to illustrate a newspaper article about the Intel plant in Kiryat Gat," he continues. "As usual in the media, it had to be done by the next day, but it turned out that there weren't enough images of Kiryat Gat on the Internet. So I built it up intuitively: OK, there must be Russians there, and Ethiopians, and Moroccans who have been stuck in the place since the 1950s and are looking for work. I wrote signs in Russian, drew a man wearing a kippa [skullcap] who was looking for a job in the want-ads, and a blond woman pushing a baby carriage, and in the middle this huge factory. The result was convincing, I hope. By the same token, I was never in West Beirut and I have never experienced situations close to what went on there. I will never know what it feels like to be shot at or how someone who fires volleys of gunfire at someone else feels. I did my army service in an intelligence base in Safed, and my rifle was lashed to my bed for three years." Are the characters in the film accurate portrayals? "Some are, such as Ron Ben-Yishai and most of Ari's interviewees. Other characters on whom the movie focuses are modeled on people from the film crew. For example, the sniper is Yoni Goodman, and that's me sitting at the bar at the beginning of the movie. On the other hand, there is a character about whom Ari's directorial instructions were that he should not resemble anyone we know, because he did not want his identity revealed and wanted nothing to do with Israel, the war or the memories from the war. I came up with a character that is really a Native American, with hardly a vestige of anything Israeli about him." What did you find important in terms of creating the Folman character? "It was important for me to draw the young Ari with a combination of rebelliousness and innocence. A boy, but not a boy. There is something intriguing about him. He did not accept the dictates of the surrounding framework - and he is still like that - but he nevertheless became an army officer. So I gave him a non-standard haircut and left him unshaven, and that is also what connects him to the present-day person." Folman: "My mother thinks I didn't come out handsome enough. David knows that. Besides that, he had to change my hair color all the time, because it kept graying. But that's all nonsense. His gigantic achievement was to get across my character at the age of 19. That was the most difficult. I myself was not connected to my character at that age. Really. I became reacquainted with myself with David's help and the help of my few photos from that period, which he made use of. His portrayal of me was of genuine psychological help to me. He found something very precise in my characterization that led me to absorb and define myself correctly at that age. David opened my eyes. He analyzed me for the illustration and discovered the dissonance within me between a constant attempt to breach frameworks and act defiantly, and the fact that I was totally within the framework. I was hardcore, man, the real thing: an officer in the Golani." Polonsky notes that there is "one crucial emphasis in the movie, which is to avoid portraying the soldiers as kids and as victims. They do not 'shoot and cry.' There is no romantic glory in the war, and no forgiveness. There is a clear, simple message that war is untenable and terrible. We went to great lengths to avoid conveying a message that war is heroic; the soldiers are neither heroes nor role models." Folman: "That is the most important element of the movie. War films miss the mark of being antiwar. When you watch films like that at the age of 15, you tell yourself that war is terrible but the soldiers are really cool, heroic, one for all, and stuff like that. I absolutely did not want kids to wish they were like the characters in the movie, including me. David, Yoni and I were constantly on the watch to make sure that there was not a shred of glorification of what we are against. There is none of the Israeli glitter of war, no hyping of the fighters. Everyone is a classic anti-hero." "It is a critical film," Polonsky adds, "even though it does not look for people to blame and does not deal with the blameworthy. The film does not touch on the commission of inquiry that investigated the massacre, the reactions to the war in Israel, or by the Phalange and the Palestinians. It also does not deal with Ari beyond his unresolved issue with the war. The film conveys the incomprehensible deformations accruing to the war. It is first of all a work of art, but I certainly would not have become involved in this project if I did not identify with his left-wing political stance." Between two cultures While the Lebanon War raged, Polonsky was fighting a battle of his own as a new immigrant from Kiev trying to integrate into Israeli society. "The last thing that interested me was that people were being killed a hundred kilometers from where I lived in Haifa," he says. "I had my own trauma, of an immigrant kid who had arrived in Israel a year earlier, and that was what preoccupied me." At first, the family - he and his sister and his father and mother, a construction engineer and a mechanical engineer, respectively - lived in Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood. "I have totally blacked out that period," Polonsky says. "Everything is totally repressed, as the Lebanon experience was for Ari. I have been told all kinds of horror stories about being abused and beaten up [by neighborhood children], but I don't remember anything. Maybe I have to make a movie about it so it will come back." The family then moved to Haifa. "We lived in the Sha'ar Ha'aliyah neighborhood, a bad area of Russian and Moroccan immigrants, where fighting was the main part of life. I remember seeing [the singer] Zohar Argov interviewed on television one night and explaining a kriz" - a drug addict's craving for a fix - "and thus realized that my neighbor was an addict, so I stopped letting him use my bike. The truth is that I don't have the strength to go into the story of how I was the fat new-immigrant Russian who always got beat up. We all know that there is nothing singular in the story of the migrant's harsh encounter with Israeliness. I was part of the small wave of immigration in the 1980s. There weren't a lot of Russian kids then, and that's a trauma I still bear, even though I had a happy childhood." What remains of all that? "What remains of it is that a key component of my feeling within Israeli culture is of being an outside observer. Your world is richer when you leap between cultures, and the encounter between cultures is instructive." He began to draw as a child, "and in Israel I also started to take drawing lessons on weekends from a Russian teacher who lived in a two-room apartment packed with objects to draw, such as vases, violins and cow skulls. That was how I connected with the Russian academic style of drawing which at the time was scorned in Israel. I internalized that scorn, and when I got to Bezalel, immediately after the army, I was terribly ashamed of the fact that I could draw well. I did all I could to be sloppy and not produce realistic work. I drew with my left hand and focused mainly on the concept and not on accurate, impressive representation. "That is what I saw in Israel, and I thought that if I adapted myself, I would be appreciated. I clung to the Bezalel conceptual foundation: functionalism of execution and of idea. If you have a simple, powerful way to get a message across, it is always preferable to ornamentation and prettification." Despite Polonsky's efforts to sabotage his drawing skills, he was considered a star student, the Russian guy who could draw better than anyone - an impressive achievement considering the fact that his graduating class in the graphic design department at Bezalel was filled with talents such as Kobi Franco, Oded Ezer, Inbal Hoffman and Aya Amikam, who is Polonsky's partner. When he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York on a six-month student exchange program, others in the class had space to blossom, says a classmate. "In New York, they reassured me that drawing well was permissible," he relates. "Today I do it deliberately. For example, a great deal of work went into 'A Moonless Night'; it is very ornamental and goes out of its way to be beautiful. The exact opposite of Nahum Gutman, say, who is charming and light and does not sweat too much just because it's hot in Tel Aviv. I sweat a lot over 'A Moonless Night,' and made no secret of it. I went back to what I was before Bezalel." Can you characterize the field of illustration in Israel today? "At the beginning of the 1990s, a revolution was fomented by the Actus group of comic book illustrators, and we are still part of that revolution. Until then, the dominant style was influenced by Gutman and Aryeh Navon, Danny Kerman, Ora Eitan and Dudu Geva. They worked within a modernist aesthetic culture, in which there are close relations between goal and result. Do not be decorative, this aesthetic proclaimed, do not be too proper, stick to minimalism, a clean approach, lightness, simplicity. And then, fashionably late by 10 years, artists like Rutu Modan, Batia Kolton, Itzik Rennert, Mira Friedmann and Yirmi Pinkus changed the illustration landscape in Israel by introducing postmodernism. People who look at what's going on abroad and try to stay updated with fashions are less occupied with documenting the Israeli reality. Visually, there is less apprehension about producing work that is beautiful, rich, complex and gifted, and less ambition to arrive exactly at the precise minimalism that will work." The late illustrator Dudu Geva symbolizes for Polonsky a point of pride in his resume. They never met, but an illustration by Polonsky was chosen for the cover of the Tel Aviv weekly "Ha'ir" that commemorated Geva, who died in 2005. "I walked around on Ben-Gurion Street and thought about Geva and his illustrations, and I looked at the benches on the avenue, and when I got home I drew the duck, Yosef, and the cactus [Geva's trademark images] sitting on a bench, depressed and shrunken. I took the images with which he is most identified, but instead of his nonchalant carelessness, I introduced my intensive scrupulousness. I'm not sure he would have liked that drawing." Polonsky notes that his illustrations are influenced by a German magazine called Simplicissimus, which was published from 1896 until 1967 and was, he says, "the home of all the best illustrators in Europe. The illustrations there are well made and capture everything that was done in illustration in the 20th century. For me it is wonderful to deal with the most Israeli subjects, such as Haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] or social situations in the country, and to illustrate them with the use of styles that are seemingly not homegrown. It is in fact an Israeli style, because it is done in Israel and I am an Israeli, but the perception is that an Israeli style is less stylized and more immediate, light and brazen." Which of your illustrations do you remember best? "An illustration to accompany an article about the state of poetry in Israel. You see a classic white muse with a harp and a plastic bag from the produce market waiting at a bus station with a pensioner and a Filipina. There is also an illustration that I recall very unfavorably - a cover for an article about Ilan Ramon [the Israeli astronaut who died in the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003] whose message was that the whole story with him was some kind of public relations hype. I drew him like a huge, half-inflated parade balloon. An air force man is inflating him and he is totally arrogant, with Stars of David in his eyes, very smug. I think Ilan Ramon was killed the day after that story was published. I amused myself with stereotypes and his wife mourned him." What about doing portraits? "It was interesting to do [the singer] Shlomo Artzi. It's hard to illustrate beautiful people, and he is symmetrical and has a beautiful face. I noticed the arrangement of his wrinkles, and what grabbed me is that a great deal of his charm, and also of what is off-putting about him, is that he really makes an effort. Such a talented person, successful and handsome, who wants so much to please and works so hard for everyone. That is what is captivating about him. In my eyes, Shlomo Artzi is the person who is the most fearful of failure and who craves most for people to love him forever. He sweats so much, with that towel of his, for people to just keep on wanting him. That is what I tried to convey. But when I did a portrait of Ninet [Tayeb, the singer who gained stardom by winning the Israeli version of "American Idol"] I went crazy, because it kept coming out like [actress] Yael Bar Zohar. They both have the same round, cute form. In the end, I drew Ninet with one tooth a little sharper than the others: something in her smile that shows she is not as innocent as people mistakenly think." Where in the movie is there a similar game with expressions and characters? "There is a short scene with Menachem Begin, in which I had to get across his apathy and weariness. I tried to get to the drama of the man. Arik [Ariel] Sharon calls him and he does not even hold the receiver to his ear. Light penetrates through drawn blinds and he is sitting in bed in pajamas, with a cup of tea. The room is in a greenish-grayish tone, it's a turbid atmosphere. His shoulders slope, he has a glazed look in his eyes. I moved his pupils around endlessly until it's clear that he is looking at nothing. He is not looking at eye-level or at the level of any object in the room. He is just not there, as in the war overall."W Bookmark to del.icio.us   Fragile cease-fire Olmert: Gaza cease-fire is fragile, may be short lived. Unbalanced stance Italy FM: EU stance on Israel in past swayed by intolerance.

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