As the 2009 Israeli film Lebanon reminds us, the best historic film finds a nugget of truth in its subject event that applies to the wider historical arc. It makes that moment in human history a reflection of a truth beyond itself. The incident itself becomes a metaphor of greater resonance. In Aristotle’s terms, that’s where a history achieves the validity of poetry.
Wrier/director Samuel Moaz based the film on his own experience in the Lebanon war of 1982. He was the gunner in a four-man tank unit. As if his psychological wounds were not enough to work out through this project, lingering pieces of shrapnel fell out of his skin during the film-making. That’s not in the film.
Shot almost entirely within the overheated, suffocating, cramped, smelly and swampy tank, the film focuses exclusively on the visceral engagement in the war, not on any political issues. And yet….
The film is framed with shots of a brilliant field of blowing sunflowers. The first reads as an emblem of the garden that the Jews transformed the desert into when they planted the Jewish state in 1948. In the last the tank appears at the back of that field, bogged down, unable to move. The garden has become a quagmire. Another Eden is being lost.
But there's a shadow side to the sunflower emblem. From Van Gogh to John Bratby the sunflower has been an agent of brightness, joy, exuberance. But also -- as Simon Wiesenthal has observed -- the Nazis planted sunflowers on their soldiers' graves. The Jewish state is built on the defeat of the Jews' enemies.
But there's a shadow side to the sunflower emblem. From Van Gogh to John Bratby the sunflower has been an agent of brightness, joy, exuberance. But also -- as Simon Wiesenthal has observed -- the Nazis planted sunflowers on their soldiers' graves. The Jewish state is built on the defeat of the Jews' enemies.
The Israeli tank soldiers are of course civilians. At first they exude an impressive efficiency and strength. But the stress takes its toll. One dies. The gunner freezes, unable to shoot, causing unnecessary deaths. The captain crumbles into paralysis. The irascible maverick holds together the best.
As the tank lumbers into the ruins of a town on the first day of the 1982 invasion, it becomes a metaphor for the Jewish state, forced to constant military self-defence since its very inception. Though the tank is invading, its soldiers seem the real prisoners, encased in the attack, helpless to break out of its path, mission and fate.
The smashed town and the scattering of murdered and dismembered Lebanese citizens form half the film’s argument against the war. The other half is the militarism forced upon the Jewish state’s defenders.
These Israelis show compassion to their enemies. One one soldier covers the naked Lebanese woman with a blanket, her clothes having born away ablaze. The Israelis refuse the Christian Falangist’s demand to be given over the Syrian prisoner for his sadistic abuse. The victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre were not thus protected.
One of the film’s most dramatic motifs is the shot of a numbed victim staring wide-eyed and accusing at the gunner. In the Israeli theatres that heart-rending stare was at the Israeli audience the gunner was defending.
That battle is over and in history but that war goes on. Israel invaded to attack the PLO, but other animosities erupted as well, tensions that continue in Lebanon unabated. Indeed they percolate anew as Iran spurs Hezballah to wage its proxy war against Israel.
And there is Israel, perpetually besieged however powerful. Its every defensive move is assailed as aggression in the global agora. It’s still that impenetrable tank that can’t quite move out of the blossoming field that is the state’s miracle, that continues to need that defence. With tens of thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli civilians, Lebanon still threatens to return to battlefield.
And there is Israel, perpetually besieged however powerful. Its every defensive move is assailed as aggression in the global agora. It’s still that impenetrable tank that can’t quite move out of the blossoming field that is the state’s miracle, that continues to need that defence. With tens of thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli civilians, Lebanon still threatens to return to battlefield.
