Category Archives: Links

Dated

I was thinking about how this book really dates itself with the references to pop culture things of the time. So I looked up alternative tentacles, which was a poster on the wall during the party scene in In My Darkest Hour. Here’s the link. I would say that it was interesting mostly due to it’s revelance then as opposed to now, since I think it’s lost a little of it’s fame in a way.

http://www.alternativetentacles.com/

Searchers – Iran vs. “Persepolis”

http://www.menassat.com/?q=en/news-articles/3186-whos-afraid-marjane-satrapi

I found this article entitled “Who’s Afraid of Marjane Satrapi?” about the political issues surrounding “Persepolis” and the film adaptation in the Arab world, particularly Lebanon which is controlled by Hezbollah, an ally of Iran. The book is critical of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The film was being kept off the screens at the request of the Censorship Directorate at Lebanon’s General Security, who were cited as saying they were only delaying the release of the film due to the dangerous political climate at the time. The article also informs that “Persepolis” has been officially banned in Iran, the film has been called “anti-revolutionary”, and the Iranian government was irate that the film was awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

It is important to remember that a book such as “Persepolis” has political ramifications as well as artistic ones.

A. Moriah Jones–searchers group 3 (clips on the animation of the movie)

Hey

So I was poking around on youtube and I found this series of videos on translating the graphic novel into the movie. I thought they were really nifty.

Each clip is only like 1-4 min so  I think they’re worth looking at.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BxZJbGDF5o

This first one is Marjane’s and Vincent Parannaud talking about their collaboration on the films animation. They mention working hand in hand on animations, one person starting and another finishing the drawing the other began.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx7V9AZ6skA&feature=related

I especially recomend this one. It went into some nice detail about the hand animation that they chose to do for the movie. One thing Marjane said that I found compelling was “computers produce a perfect image. But since we as humans are not perfect their is something unnatural about the perfection” She mentions the shaking of the human hand adding something to the line… It was really cool to see how a whole team works on a project like this…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD6qxyH5rA4&feature=related

The art of tracing. In this clip they show that the final step for the drawings is fro them to be traced with a felt pen. This had apparently not been done inFrench animation for about 20 years. This was another enligthing one. They make mention of the thickness of the line and how capturing a certain curve or some other detail in the line is essential to conveying the emotion behind the drawing. I was reminded of McCloud.

Searchers – “Persepolis 2.0”

http://www.spreadpersepolis.com/

Well, I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t much, but it is, at the very least interesting. It is like Persepolis, in a way, but without the autobiographical elements; just historical account of the regime change. It uses pictures from the graphic novel, but they are re-contextualized in order to convey new meaning. It isn’t incredibly well done, but it seems that it was created more as a way of informing people who may support change in modern Iran. It’s also rather short, but even with the altered meanings of the panels, its somewhat impressive that there is a cohesive narrative.

Searchers: Two interesting reviews

I found a couple of great reviews on JSTOR.

Review One:

The first is a cartoon review of Persepolis 1 & 2, by Jennifer Camper.  It’s not only interesting, but it’s also quite funny and insightful.  For instance, in the first frame, two Iranian women are in a bookstore and one says to the other, “I see we’re still the flavor of the month” (8).  Later one of the women laments the fact that it took “an attack on America to get people interested in our stories” (8).  The book review itself touches not only on the politics and culture of this memoir, but also the artistic process behind it all.  I’ll bring in a copy for class.

Source: The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 21, No. 12 (Sep., 2004), pp. 8-9

Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4024475

Review two:

For those interested in additional reading from the Iranian woman’s perspective, I recommend reading this review by Nahid Mozaffari, who writes that “memoirs are to the publishing industry what reality shows are to television” (516). We’ve touched briefly on these books during class:

  • Journey from the Land of No:  A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, by Roya Hakakian
  • Lipstick Jihad:  A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran, by Azadeh Moaveni
  • Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi

In addition to reviewing each book, Ms. Mozaffari offers some interesting details about the cultural and political reasons why Iranian memoirs are so popular right now.  For instance, she believes that for Americans confused by the history and politics of the area, it is “easier to look at the different cultures and difficult problems through the lens of one person at a time” (517).

It’s a long-ish review, but well-worth your time.

Source: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1/2, The Global & the Intimate (Spring – Summer, 2006), pp. 516-527

Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004783

Searcher – NPR interview with Satrapi – Alexa

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4774402899804593285&ei=B-7xSsTUEZzcqgLU_OWlCw&q=persepolis+interview&hl=en&view=2#

 

I found a video of a NPR interview with Marjane Satrapi. The first question asked relates a specific frame in the graphic novel – when the girls are playing with their veils and having childlike banter about them. Satrapi describes her interaction with the veil as a child saying that she and her friends did play with it. However, she wouldn’t be allowed in school without it and women weren’t allowed out of the house without it. Satrapi points out how women are able to show more hair today and the veil isn’t as long as it used to be. The video mixes pictures from the graphic novel with clips and still frames from the movie. I haven’t seen the movie, but just from this video, I’ve noticed that the artwork is different. The older women are longer in size and their lines are more curved (more complex). I believe this is because they aren’t limited to frames.

The interview also discusses who were the “guardians of the revolution” which Satrapi says were the army, police, and people who dressed as rangers who made order. Hearing Satrapi discuss this makes the story of Persepolis more real to me. While I know it’s a graphic novel based on her life and actual, historical events, the medium of it being portrayed through a graphic novel makes it seem less real to me. Hearing Marjane Satrapidiscuss the graphic novel and having it be  accompanied by images makes it easier for me to remember that this is HER story and the events are true.

interview w/ satrapi

In this brief interview with marjane satrapi, satrapi gives a quick overview of the story she captures in The Complete Persepolis. For example, she discusses the issue of the obligatory wearing of the veil for women. In one of the first pages of the book, there is a picture of the girls playing with their veils. Satrapi discusses how this picture was not an exaggeration, the girls really did take their veils off and play with them each chance they got, claiming that the wearing of the veil was not the choice of the Iranian people. I thought it was especially interesting how Satrapi talked about the apparent freedom of the press that exists in Iran now. I would need to do more research on this, because i interviewed an Iranian refugee about 2 years ago who told me that the press was still government controlled, and that you could criticize the government in the media. maybe this has changed, i don’t know. It was cool to hear Satrapi give a brief overview of what she was trying to capture in her book during the Islamic revolution. It sort of gives you a better insight into Satrapi’s approach.

ben

Searchers- Interview With Marjane Satrapi

Here is one of the many Marjane Satrapi interviews to be posted. Don’t let the name of the website deter you, this in depth interview gives some great insight into Satrapi’s inspiration and creativity.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_10_003261.php

What I found most interesting is her explanation into her creative process of each book. There are obvious differences between the two, and she really gets down into what sets them apart. Identity plays such a large role in the novel, and having Satrapi provide her intention puts a whole other spin on it. Also, note where she discusses Art Spegelman. Never realized how similar their works are until now.

Searchers: Marjane Satrapi’s Experiences with Comics

Looking around YouTube, I found an interview on IFC with Marjane Satrapi, where she basically goes into what comics she read as a child. She explains that most of the comics that she read, she read in France, and the first comic she received there was Art Spieglman’s Maus. She talks about how before reading Maus she thought that comics were only for children, but after reading that she realized that for her, the images and the text aren’t separate, and that comics are just another way for her to express herself. She also discusses how her grandmother influenced the way she thinks in terms of ethics.

Searcher- Persepolis

I thought with all the Twitter questions I would start by linking everyone to the main website for the film.  There you can find your trailer and get a feel for the movie.  http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/persepolis/

I am enjoying the novel greatly and I wanted to learn more on my own about persepolis itself.  As a history major this are of the world is outside of my concentration and my curiosity won.  I discovered http://www.iranchamber.com/history/persepolis/persepolis1.php which gave great layouts of palaces and has many pictures.

I was following links and reading reviews about the graphic novel when I came across another book by her following the lives of women she also did one for the personal history of her uncle.  http://www.amazon.com/Marjane-Satrapi/e/B001IGFN9I/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

she is amazing at dissecting and illustrating personal and intimate stories and bringing them to life for people who have never known about the culture or people or religion to understand.  She has written many graphic novels but I think persepolis may be the only one to gain such high recognition.

Searchers – Persepolis

I must apologize, I have failed as a searcher. I was going to try to track down a listing for “Dialectic Materialism,” the comic book version that Satrapi said she read in “Perseplois.” It turns out I was not the only one that has tried to find this title as I stumbled across a forum post here.

This lead to two things, one was an interview with the author of “Persepolis,” and this part caught my eye.

“Dave: You didn’t grow up with comic books, though, right? You mention the one your parents gave you on dialectic materialism.

Satrapi: That was the only comic book that I read. My cousins were reading Tintin and these kinds of things, but in Tintin you don’t have any female persons, so I couldn’t identify with any of it.

I have read some comics, a little bit, but I don’t come from a culture of comics. When I see my other colleagues, all of them from the age of five wanted to become cartoonists. I had so many professions before. I didn’t want to do this particularly. It just happened.

All my life it has been like that. I’m a very hard working person if I have to be, but I won’t kill myself to achieve a goal. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”

(The whole interview can be found here.)

I found it very interesting that someone that had not grown up with comic books still ended up making one.  The other thing I found was a theory that the book that she read was “Marx for Beginners.” I was fortunate enough to find a copy that I could flip though, but I do not believe this is the book Satrapi read, mainly because the book itself is less a comic book and more of a heavily illustrated novel. And I also could not find what Satrapi described in Persepolis on pages 12 and 13.

Searchers – Persepolis – The Concept of “Ketman”

In a nutshell, the concept of “ketman” (similar to the concept of “taqiyah”) is the act of denouncing one’s true beliefs in public while secretly maintaining a fervent belief in them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketman

For someone like Satrapi and her family, living a life under the Islamic Republic would have required that they practice Ketman. What’s interesting is that the same practice that evolved out of the Shia subjugation at the hands of the Sunni would come to be reclaimed by the victims of a Shiite regime. Also, the concept found resonance with East European writers living under Communism, who recognized their own suffering in the tales of persecuted Shia in the Middle East.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200607/hitchens-persian/3

Persepolis – because of it’s stand against the tyranny of the Islamic Republic – can really only be viewed in Iran as pirated or smuggled-in material. I just thought it was interesting that a novel displaying classical Iranian themes of political and religious persecution (ketman) should have so much in common with the works of the Eastern European dissidents, and find its only way back into Iran in the form of samizdat. Those struggling under Communism borrowing from ancient Persian tradition while the Persians of today resort to some of the same distribution methods those under Communism used decades ago.

Searchers – Persepolis

Here is a link to the site for American travel writer and documentarian Rick Steves, specifically his series on Iran.

http://www.ricksteves.com/iran/iran_menu.htm

I thought that it would be good to get some kind of background on Iran while reading Persepolis, especially in light of the fact that most Americans – just by accident of the media in our country – have a poor understanding of the country. Steves’ documentary is decidedly non-political and will present a side of Iran that most non-Iranians probably had no clue even existed. (Biggest surprise? A lot of Iranians actually like Americans.)

I think that it’s important to balance the picture of the political Iran – the Iran of the Revolution, the Iran of the recent electoral coup d’etat, the Iran of Evin prison – with the Iran experienced by the millions of Iranians actually living in the country day in and day out. I think you could easily compare current day Iran to the late Brezhnev-era Soviet Union – the vast majority of the people know the government is corrupt and illegitimate, and a growing number are openly challenging the ruling regime. Persepolis is a great story of how that current regime came to be, and I think one of the most interesting things about reading it is seeing how some of those absurdities / inconsistencies that Iranians today have to deal with originated in the first place.

(Incidentally, Satrapi herself, currently living in France, is unsurprisingly a supporter of the Green opposition movement around Mousavi.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Politics/?id=3.0.3433629806

I think Marjane Satrapi – forced into exile, where her most important creative works enjoy much more support outside of Iran than within – is a great example of the Iran that could have been, if only the Revolution had turned out differently.)

Searcher: Gene Yang Interview with “The Trades”

http://www.the-trades.com/article.php?id=5053

Here’s another interview with Gene Yang on the subject of American Born Chinese I thought was interesting. It covers some of the inspiration behind the novel, themes present throughout it, and so on. Yang also says a bit about why he chose comics as a medium for expression. It also touches on some of the research Yang did for the novel.