Abstract
Animation has frequently engaged with trauma, whether depicting political oppression as seen in the work of Soviet film-makers such as Dmitry Babichenko or via the Disney studio portraying childhood loss. Persepolis continues the trend, including the link with children, by focussing on the autobiographical observations of the young Marjane Satrapi as she experiences the personal and collective traumas of being an Iranian girl growing up in the wake of the Islamic Revolution. Although the graphic novels on which the movie is based have been discussed in respect of trauma, the film has experienced less scrutiny. This chapter explores the film’s construction of history via collective and personal memory, with a focus on its malleability in relation to the recollection of trauma. From a perspective of exile, Persepolis visualises the network of collective memories that situate Marji as a witness to national traumatic events, whilst the communal rememberings coalesce with the localised experiences of the individual; in doing so, elements are forgotten, are too painful to articulate, or are rewritten. This process of erasure and renewal, I argue, manifests itself both within the text and intertextually. Moreover, the film’s aesthetic provides a representational strategy for this, with the animation medium central to the process of formalising competing histories of trauma, as it enables slippages between various states. Thus, I will set out its aesthetic of trauma, which appropriates the film’s fantastical and constructed features to seamlessly combine events, imaginings and memories from multiple storytellers; through such an arrangement, the film articulates the ways in which we negotiate pain and distress as lived experiences and so produces a testimony of the subjectivity of trauma.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Afary, Janet. 2009. Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bovenschen, Silvia. 1977. Is There a Feminine Aesthetic? Trans. by Beth Weckmueller, New German Critique, 10(Winter), 111–137.
Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 3–12. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
Chute, Hillary. 2008. The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Women’s Studies Quarterly 36(1 & 2) (Spring/Summer): 92–110.
Dabashi, Hamid. 2001. Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future. London: Verso.
Davies, Jon. 2008. A Polite Way of Being Desperate; An Interview with Marjane Satrapi (Interview). CineAction 75: 58–61.
Frey, James. 2003. A Million Little Pieces. London: John Murray.
IMDb. 2014. Persepolis. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808417/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. Accessed 21 November 2014.
Jaafar, Ali. 2008. Children of the Revolution. Sight and Sound 18(5): 46–47.
Kemp, Philip. 2014. Reiniger, Lotte (1899–1981). Screenonline. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/528134/. Accessed 6 December 2014.
Lant, Antonia. 2006. Women’s Independent Cinema: The Case of Leeds Animation Workshop. In Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, 2nd edn, ed. Lester D. Friedman, 159–181. London: Wallflower.
Laub, Dori. 1992. Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub, 57–74. New York: Routledge.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Lury, Karen. 2005. The Child in Film and Television: Introduction. Screen 46(3): 307–314.
Malek, Amy. 2006. Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production: A Case Study of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Series. Iranian Studies 39(3): 353–380.
McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial.
McGrath, Charles. 2004. Not Funnies. New York Times Magazine, 11 July 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/not-funnies.html?smid=pl-share&pagewanted=3&pagewanted=print. Accessed 12 January 2015.
Miller, Ann. 2011. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: Eluding the Frames. L’Esprit Créateur 51(1): 38–52.
Naficy, Hamid. 1993. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
———. 2001. Iranian Cinema. In Companion Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film, ed. Oliver Leaman, 130–217. London: Routledge.
Palmer, Tim. 2011. Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Polk, William R. 2009. Understanding Iran: Everything You Need to Know, From Persia to the Islamic Republic, from Cyprus to Ahmadinejad. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sadr, Hamid Reza. 2006. Iranian Cinema: A Political History. London: I.B. Tauris.
Satrapi, Marjane. 2008. Persepolis. Trans. by L’Association, Paris, France and Anjali Singh. London: Vintage Books.
Walker, Janet. 2001. Trauma Cinema: False Memories and True Experience. Screen 42(2): 211–216.
Wells, Paul. 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.
Filmography
Bambi (David D. Hand, USA, 1942).
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed/The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, Germany, 1926).
Dokhtar-e Lor/The Lor Girl (Ardeshir Irani, Iran, 1933).
Gerald McBoing Boing (Robert Cannon, USA, 1951).
Khaneh siah ast/The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, 1963).
Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/USA, 2007).
Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, USA, 1940).
Sib/The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, Iran/France, 1998).
The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, USA, 1994).
The Unicorn in the Garden (William Hurtz, USA, 1953).
War Chronicles (Dmitry Babichenko, Soviet Union, 1939).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Allen, S. (2017). Persepolis: Telling Tales of Trauma. In: Hodgin, N., Thakkar, A. (eds) Scars and Wounds. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41024-1_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41024-1_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-41023-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-41024-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)