After our trip to Ziegfield, my cousin headed back uptown to look at apartments with her roommate. Since it was early in the afternoon, I stayed in midtown and hoofed it the few blocks to my next destination, which was the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, just across Broadway from Lincoln Center, between 62nd and 63rd (map).
My plan for seeing multiple movies in one day in Manhattan was easy to execute because before leaving Massachusetts, I had made a detailed set of little maps of all the movie theaters in Manhattan, with all the cross streets, and all the movie times for the shows I wanted to see. It was fun to set it into motion.
The Lincoln Plaza Cinema was one of those movie theaters that was invisible from the street. There was a little box office on Broadway, in the middle of a strip shopping center with many other businesses. After you bought a ticket, you had to go into a separate entrance of the building, and down escalators to the lower level, where all the theaters were. The auditorium was about as "plain brown wrapper" as you could get.
I was really excited to see Waltz With Bashir because of all the buzz about it. It's up for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscar, and it is the strong favorite to win.
In case you haven't heard, it's an animated film made by an Israeli man, about his own search to unearth memories of his experience with the massacre of Palestinian refugees during the 1982 Lebanon War. In addition to telling the story of the war, it's also about the idea of memory itself, and how we choose to remember or forget certain things, especially during wartime.
I found the movie to be very fascinating and worthy of the acclaim it has received, both in terms of its story, and its production style. One of the things that interested me about the movie was something I heard on the radio, during an interview with the filmmaker, Ari Folman.
Folman said he has long been a dissident artist in Israel, and the Israeli government had often pestered him and hampered him in the past. But no such with this movie. In fact, the government had embraced it, and was enthusiastically promoting it around the world as a new model of Israeli filmmaking.
Given the controversial nature of the film, specifically that points to Israeli collaboration in the massacre (which was carried out by Christian Arabs), this seemed a bit puzzling even to Folman himself.
This was the question I kept asking myself during the movie: why had the Israeli government decided to champion this film? Was this a genuine promotion of artistic freedom, or part of Israeli hasbara? Certainly I couldn't answer that question in any real detail, since I know little about internal Israeli politics.
Nevertheless some answers began to form in my mind. It was especially interesting to contemplate them in the midst of Lincoln Plaza Cinema, since the auditorium was packed, and about half of the people there seemed like old Jewish grandmothers out to see a Sunday flick. Given recent events, I couldn't help projecting myself into their shoes. Some of them might be critics of Israel for its recent actions in Gaza, but there were probably plenty of them who felt that any criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism. What would they think, watching this movie?
Like I said, I could only make guesses. But at the end of the movie, I did feel like I had at least part of the answer. It had to do with the story of the actual massacre. As bad as the Israelis looked in the movie, their perfidy paled in comparison to Christian Arab militia members who actually did the slaughtering. The Israelis looked civilized compared to the Arabs. So yes, the film was critical of Israel, but it seemed like it was also possible to walk out the theater thinking, "At least the Jews aren't as bad as those horrible Christians, who are bloodthirsty savages. The tragedy was that Israel got mixed up with those people in the first place."
So in some respects, the movie seemed to have something for everyone---except for Christian Arabs.
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