The event was sold out, so naturally the bar was completely overwhelmed. It took a really long time for me to get a glass of Spanish red wine, for which they charged me $6. Not unreasonable.
Before the screening, there was a brief on-stage interview with Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, the directors. The movie is based on Satrapi's Persepolis memoir. Satrapi's appearance was the highlight of the evening. She is a very smart & a very funny woman. There was a comic opposition between her outgoing, out-spoken personality & her co-director's reserved & silent demeanor. Among the concepts she threw out in her answers to questions:
- She dislikes the label "graphic novel" to describe her books, "novel" being a far too bourgeois art form.
- We usually stop drawing by the time we're 10, so we think of drawing as something that belongs to childhood. We can talk about how poetry or music has meaning, but we have no way of talking about how a drawing has meaning. Yet drawing is prior to writing.
- When we think of animation, we tend to think of cartoon rabbits, but animation is not a genre, it's a medium.
- Fanatics know how to push the buttons of people's emotions. They get people to start yelling or be fearful. Any artistic work (which is about asking questions, not providing answers) or intellectual work, therefore, is a work against fanaticism.
- When asked how she had the courage to tell this story, she said that Italo Calinvo says, "I write to express myself without getting interrupted."
2 comments:
How great to hear that Satrapi is as whip-smart as her work, I wish I could have gone to this.
Judging by what was on display that evening, I'd say that the books give a pretty honest portrait of her personality. It was easy to imagine her as the precocious child depicted in the 1st volume.
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