Marjane Satrapi has been publishing graphic novels since the beginning of the new millennium. But it wasn’t until the 2007 Cannes Film Festival that the Paris-based Iranian launched herself on to the global stage with the premiere of her animated film Persepolis.
The film, based on her hugely popular series of graphic novels, tells Satrapi’s own story of growing up as a young, rebellious girl during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and of returning years later to a drastically different homeland. The film quickly garnered widespread critical acclaim, and, with an Oscar nomination to her name, Marjane Satrapi suddenly found herself at the forefront of independent cinema.
On 19 July, Satrapi and co-director Vincent Paronnaud will once again return to the studio to begin work on their next big-screen production—a live-action adaptation of her graphic novel Chicken With Plums.
And, as she so masterfully did with her on-screen version of Persepolis, Satrapi seems determined to explore new boundaries in a contemporary cinematic landscape she considers stifled by skewed, corporate ideas of what’s “new.”
“Where is the room for innovation?” the artist rhetorically asked in May, when formally announcing her upcoming film. “There is less and less space for projects that are not like anything else. For instance, there is this theory that the cinema of tomorrow will only be in 3D. I am in 3D: that doesn't make it interesting.
“Whenever cinema goes through a period of change, people talk about 3D,” she argues. “It happened in the 1950s and the 1980s. But 3D was invented in the time of the Lumière brothers.”
Yet in cinema, as in every other art form, the real or perceived originality of any one idea is always restricted by the works, thoughts and aesthetic iterations that precede it. And Marjane Satrapi, by her own admission, is certainly no exception. As she stated in a 2008 interview—and as famed film critic Andrew Sarris noted in his review for the New York Observer—Persepolis boasts indelible influences from both Italian Neo-Realist and German Expressionist cinematic movements.
Ostensibly, the combination seems somewhat incongruous. Post-World War II Neo-Realist directors like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini took to the streets to shoot films—often with amateur actors—in an effort to render their works as quasi-fictional documentaries. By shooting films in recognizable settings, and with everyday actors, Neo-Realist directors emphasized the very hard reality of the social, political and economic ills they sought to expose to wider audiences.
German Expressionists, on the other hand, almost exclusively limited themselves to the studio, where they could create wildly fantastical and slightly unsettling dreamscapes. (Satrapi and Paronnaud, it should be noted, will reportedly shoot Chicken with Plums in Berlin’s famed Babelsberg Studio, where Fritz Lang produced his masterpiece, Metropolis).
Expressionist directors, like their younger, Neo-Realist brethren, also derived much of their filmic aesthetic from their socially and politically tumultuous environs. At the turn of the century, directors like Lang and F.W. Murnau found themselves at the cusp of a cultural revolution, fueled by an impending global conflict of unprecedented scale. As sociologist and art critic Wolfgang Rothke writes, “Young people were angered and repelled by the all too contradictory aspects of feudal aristocracy, economic expansionism and unquestioning belief in scientific progress.”
Much like Lang and Murnau, Satrapi’s life has been marked by similar social and political upheaval. She fled Iran twice, as she so heartbreakingly depicts in Persepolis, only to return as an adult, disillusioned with the acidic fruits that the 1979 Revolution bore.
After having traversed such a non-linear personal trajectory, it’s no surprise that Satrapi would be artistically drawn to Expressionist films. One need only glance at a few frames of Persepolis to see fossilized remnants of the exaggerated, stylized set designs in the classic 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Satrapi’s narrative may be more tempered, her characters less tortured, but she still manages to inject a healthy undercurrent of oblique uncertainty into her two-dimensional renderings.
In person, however, the director is decidedly straightforward. As with Italian Neo-Realist mise-en-scene, there’s something endearingly candid and genuine about Satrapi’s public demeanor. She’s notoriously hesitant to give interviews, but when she does, she doesn’t waste a single breath. Her lunar eyes wax and wane throughout the course of carving out an idea, while her demonstrative gestures act almost like waves, cyclically pushing her thoughts ashore.
Much of what she says, meanwhile, is often imbued with a sometimes shocking tinge of frankness. As an unabashed public critic of George W. Bush, an outspoken advocate for Iranian opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi in 2009, and an almost comically enthusiastic smoker, Satrapi clearly isn’t one to cloak her principles behind veils of diplomacy.
Listening to her espouse her stance on politics or gender equality, one even gets the impression that the world of Marjane Satrapi, like her Persepolis landscape, is limited to black-and-white.
"In Iran, if a man touches you, you have to hit him. If someone touches me up, I punch him in the mouth,” she told the Independent in 2006. “It's that simple.”
As forthright and “simple” as her philosophy may seem, the most striking aspect of Satrapi’s worldview is actually her unmitigated rejection of absolutism. However assertively she may declare an opinion, whether in film or in person, it’s usually tinged with an aura of humor, a reassuring disclaimer of self-awareness that precludes anyone from taking her too seriously. Much like her Expressionist forefathers, Satrapi’s judiciously implemented dry humor keeps the audience perpetually off-guard, never allowing the viewer to get lulled into digesting her images as political Gospel.
“I’m not the voice of a generation, I’m not a political representative,” she told Time Out Dubai in March. “I’m a human being that was born in a certain place and time, and I wrote an extremely subjective point of view that was my memory of that period.”
It’s this fundamental tension—this push and pull between hard, linear reality and disjointed, subjective chaos—that makes Satrapi’s work so artistically compelling. She may show us the world through a black-and-white lens, and every character, word, or political circumstance that passes through that lens may be based in her own “Neo-Realist” existence. But there’s always an Expressionist counterweight, an open-ended question of disjointed causality that paradoxically brings Satrapi’s images into greater, three-dimensional relief, while simultaneously blurring her binary hues into myriad shades of grey.
Satrapi certainly doesn’t use her art to reinvent the cinematic wheel. But she does make it gyrate in new and viscerally puissant ways. At a time when mainstream cinema appears caught in an artistic quagmire of corporate interest, it will likely be people like Marjane Satrapi who shift the medium’s gears out of neutral, and push it ever closer to new visual precipices.
As every great auteur before her, Satrapi seems to possess a preternatural understanding of what it means to be “new” in a field where the concept of originality takes on a connotation entirely divergent from every other arena. Marjane Satrapi can’t reinvent her own history, and she can’t recount it with new artistic devices.
What she can do, though, is pick up the bits and pieces of her forerunners, mix them together with her own personal narrative, and carve out a new corner in the constantly shifting mosaic of contemporary cinema. For, as Jean-Luc Godard famously said, “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
