Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema: 11 (International Library of the Moving Image) - Hardcover

'The concept of the social "victim" as a significant focus of the realist tradition in documentary film was first proposed in 1988 during an earlier phase of documentary film studies. It has since become something of a given. Raya Morag's Waltzing with Bashir is a critically important further contribution arguing for a significant rethinking of this central idea. It goes beyond [but does not ignore] aesthetics to grapple with the vexed issue of the representation of extreme violence and other trauma in the documentary and elsewhere to raise the consequences of the representation of such events not only for the victims but also for the perpetrators. Waltzing with Bashir emerges from a strand of oppositional Israeli thinking which is too little known outside of the country. Morag raises issues that make the already complex questions of documentary ethics even more difficult. Such a twin agenda requires a breadth of scholarship, sensitivity and acute political understanding. She is more than equal to the task, and the book is an important tradition to the literature on documentary ethics at hand. Because of its originality and the gravity of its subject, I am confident that this book will be widely noticed.' - Brian Winston, Lincoln School of Journalism, The University of Lincoln, UK 'It is time to think about the trauma of perpetrators, not because they are without guilt, but because they are the ghostly other side of the equation necessary to understanding guilt. This is an eye-opening book!' - Linda Williams, Department of Film and Media, UC Berkeley, USA, "Outstanding... remarkable. paradigm-shifting book." - Bill Nichols, Studies in Documentary Film

Waltzing with Bashir proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies - the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from the trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, the book seeks to theorize this still under-studied field thus breaking the repression of this concept and phenomenon in psychoanalysis and in cinema literature. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between testimony given by the victim and confession made by the perpetrator, this pioneering work ventures to define and analyze perpetrator trauma in scholarly, representational, literary, and societal contexts. In contrast to the twentieth-century definition of the perpetrator based on modern wars and totalitarian regimes,Morag defines the perpetrator in the context of the twenty-first century's new wars and democratic regimes. The direct result of a drastic transformation in the very nature of war, made manifest by the lethal clash between soldier and civilian in a battlefield newly defined in bodily terms, the new trauma paradigm stages the trauma of the soldier turned perpetrator, thus offering a novel perspective on issues of responsibility and guilt. Such theoretical insights demonstrate that the epistemology of the post-witness era requires breaking deep-seated psychological and psychiatric, as well as cultural and political, repression. Driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentary cinema, Waltzing with Bashir analyzes the Israeli film and literature produced in the aftermath of the second Intifada. As Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir and other new wave films demonstrate, Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli Occupation, is a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both victim and perpetrator traumas, and for revisiting and recontextualizing the crucial moment in which the victim/perpetrator cultural symbiosis is dismantled.