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Last update - 12:04 15/09/2008 'Artistic work is anti-fanatic' By Uri Klein Tags: Art, Iran, Israel Marjane Satrapi, the co-director of an animated movie based on her graphic novel about growing up in Iran, never thought her novel or the movie based on it would be successful. But the book has already sold more than a million copies and been translated into 24 languages, including Hebrew. And her movie - "Persepolis," which is hitting Israeli screens this week - won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and was nominated for an Oscar this year. Nonetheless, the film remains something of a puzzle for the 39-year-old director, who lived through the 1979 Islamic Revolution. "I've never understood why I made this film," says Satrapi in a phone interview from her Paris home. "When it was suggested to me that a film be made based on a graphic diary I had written, I thought it was a very bad idea. But then they convinced me that it would be a challenge, that it would obligate me to research new areas of art that I have no clue about, that in contrast to the work I had done until then, it would obligate me to learn to work with other people - among them Vincent Paronnaud, also a writer of comic books, who together with me wrote and directed the film. Advertisement "And since I have always loved film, not only animated films but rather cinema in general, from all periods, I agreed. And altogether, to how many people does it happen that a director contacts them and says: 'Take money and make a film'?" The conversation with Satrapi flows easily. Her insight, energy and humor make it seem as though we are speaking face to face. We discuss why the book and the film have enjoyed such success and why she is so enamored of Israeli directors like Ari Folman, whose movie "Waltz with Bashir," about the 1982 Lebanon war, broke ground by being filmed as an animated documentary. Has Satrapi been successful because her graphic novel and movie are about Iran, a country much in the news, I asked. Is it because they are perceived as a critique of the regime that took over Iran in the wake of the Iranian revolution, and this is what the West wants to hear? But Satrapi says these are not the reasons, adding that most of the people who come up to her after a screening say that rather than contribute to the demonization of Iran in Western eyes, the movie reduces outsiders' fear of Iran - showing them, she says with an ironic tinge to her voice, that "Iranians are like everyone else." "My film is not about the conflict between East and West or between Islam and Christianity and other religions, and therefore I also tried to make it so that stylistically the sequences that are set in Iran would not have an 'Orientalist' character as compared to the sequences that are set in Europe," she says. "The film deals with the conflict between fanatics and non-fanatics, and this is a conflict that happens nowadays in every country, including in Europe and in the United States. Any intellectual and artistic work is anti-fanatic. Its aim is to ask questions, not to give answers. I don't have any answers." Satrapi says that though "Persepolis" is based on her life, it is not a completely factual autobiography. "It would be a falsehood to say that this is exactly what my life was like," she says. "This isn't a documentary film. The fact that the film tells a life story that takes place in the heart of the historical events around it is without a doubt one of the reasons for its success." The story begins during the last years of the shah's rule. Satrapi's parents - she is their only child - lead a comfortable life in pre-revolutionary Iran, but hope for the fall of the shah's corrupt regime. But instead of making life better, the revolution leads to the arrest and execution of Satrapi's uncle. The director herself, an anarchist in the making, tends to get in trouble. She wears a Michael Jackson T-shirt under her traditional Islamic garb and buys tapes of her favorite rock groups - she particularly likes Iggy Pop - that are sold clandestinely in the streets of Tehran. Her parents are afraid she will fall into the hands of the Revolutionary Guard, and with the encouragement of an energetic an opinionated grandmother, they decide to send her to Vienna, where a good friend of her mother's lives, at the age of 14. In exile, Satrapi continues to get in trouble. At the lowest point in her young life there, she lives in the streets, sells drugs, and nearly dies of bronchitis. Deciding she has no alternative, Satrapi opts to veil her face and return home. But there, too, she feels alien, as though she does not belong. At 21 she marries a young artist, whom she divorces three years later. She leaves Iran again at 24 and ultimately remarries, to a Swedish man who is her present-day husband. The narrative and formal richness of the film transcend this brief plot summary. Although the visual style seems quite simple - most of it is drawn in black and white - it is extremely varied and stylistically complex. "I never thought of making my book into a non-animated film," says Satrapi. "On the contrary, even. Cinema is a more universal medium than comics, and the transition from graphic novel to animated film obligated me to rethink the basics of my work with respect to the creation of an illusion of movement, the creation of timing and the creation of rhythm. Even though there appears to be a resemblance between them, because both of them are made up of images, an animated film is very different from a graphic novel; perhaps it is even more difficult to transfer a graphic novel than a regular novel to film. "I don't have any objection to the complex animated films that they are producing in Hollywood nowadays. Some of them are very beautiful, but I intentionally decided to go back in the film to the fundamentals of animation. I chose a style that was possible to have executed in France, so I wouldn't have to send it for rendering to China, for example. After all, people draw even before they write or read or film. Making the film obligated me to go back to the fundamentals of the cinema, to its beginning." Satrapi says she intentionally filled the movie with references to the history of painting - one of the most beautiful moments in the movie boast a sudden reference to Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" - and the history of film. "I wanted the painting to appear on the screen like a whisper," says Satrapi. As for cinematic history, Satrapi says her movie contains references to "the Soviet cinema of the 1920s, the German Expressionist cinema, to films that I especially love, such as 'The Night of the Hunter,' the horror tale that Charles Laughton directed in 1955, and also the experimental films that were produced in France during the era of the silent film or the first Mickey Mouse films that Walt Disney produced in black and white." Satrapi says she had to completely rethink her graphic novel to create the film. "From the outset I knew that I would not be able to adapt all four volumes of [the novel] 'Persepolis' into a film of about 90 minutes," she says. "I'm not [Austrian actor and director] Erich von Stroheim, and I can't suggest to producers the making of a film that is eight hours long. This forced me to boil down the plot and think about it from the beginning." "Stylistically," says Satrapi, "I wanted a distinction to emerge between the personal level and the historical level that surrounds it, a difference between the way I depict the 'normal life' of Marjane and her family and the depiction of the revolution or, later, the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq" - scenes that give rise to some of the most impressive moments in the film. "I wanted the entire film to move between the realistic and the hallucinatory and even the fantastic; I wanted it to have the character of a tale for children at moments, and also the magnitude of a nightmare." "From the outset, I knew that only if I succeeded in emphasizing the personal dimension of the film would it have universal significance," she says. "I am not a historian and not a sociologist and not a political commentator. If the film had not had the personal dimension, it would have become a political lecture with very limited aims. Humor had an important role in the process of transforming the personal into the universal." Indeed, although the film has many chilling moments, there are also quite a few witty and amusing comic moments. "It's humor, and not crying, that enables us to get to know and understand the other, to identify the resemblances between us," says Satrapi. "Humor is a part of culture. If you eliminate it from the reality that is depicted in the film, the reality becomes false. Because the personal dimension exists in the film, it raises universal questions like what is a state, what is a homeland, what is national identity, and what are personal and individual alienation and exile." Today, after having lived in France for 12 years, Satrapi says she is still not entirely certain about her identity. "I went through a profound identity crisis, first in Vienna and then when I went back to Iran," she says. "Today, I don't know - either I have a lot of identities or I don't have an identity at all. This is not a simple situation. But on the other hand, it affords me the distance from which to observe the reality. I can live anywhere. This is a little sad, but also it's not. Roots are a good thing, but they are also a source of national chauvinism, racism and militarism." When I tell Satrapi that her film could be described as the story of a young woman's maturation in an era of social and historical change, and potentially putting it in a feminist context, she does not respond with enthusiasm. Nor is she especially excited, to put it mildly, about the fact that her film is going to be screened at the International Women's Film Festival in Rehovot. Ghettos of this sort deter her. "Would you go to a men's film festival?" she asks. The only division she recognizes is between good people and "assholes," the word she uses in English. At Cannes last year, she became friendly with Eran Kolirin, the Israeli writer and director of "The Band's Visit," whose movie about an Egyptian police band visiting Israel won an Israeli Film Academy award and was also competing at Cannes. Satrapi and Kolirin are still in touch, a friendship she says was the target of stupid comments by those who asked her what an Iranian director and an Israeli one could possibly have in common. "Eran is closer to me than a lot of other people," says Satrapi. She says she loves his movie heart and soul and has seen it eight times so far. (Incidentally, it was Kolirin who persuaded Satrapi to grant this interview after she said she was tired of talking about her movie.) This year, Satrapi was a member of the jury at Cannes. She describes "Waltz With Bashir," which took part in the same competition as hers, as "a great film, an important film, a film that is taking cinema to places it has not been yet." She is glad that animation is moving up in the world and emerging from the cinematic world intended only for children. She also agrees that the increasing use of animation in other cinematic fields testifies to the crisis facing cinema and the culture as a whole. "We are inundated with news more than ever, but this isn't making us any wiser," says Satrapi. "The more it seems to us that we know, the less we know and understand." It was Satrapi's acquaintance with Kolirin that got her interested in Israeli film. She recently saw "7 Days," an Israeli movie by directors Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, and she admires the way it combines the individual family story with the universal context. Satrapi is now more excited than ever about the cinema, and is busy writing her next movie. It too will be based on a graphic novel she has written, and it tells the story of a love affair in the 1950s. Don't expect another animated flick, though. This one will be a movie made entirely in the studio, just as Hollywood used to make 'em. Satrapi loves this cinematic style - but don't worry, she just may go back to animation in another 10 years. Bookmark to del.icio.us   'Pilobolus in Israel' Now Israel's most beautiful sites can be visited in New York City. West Bank violence Palestinian woman dies after being shoved to the ground by IDF troops.   1.   No maintenance done whatsoever 19:38  |  Aaron 20/09/08   2.   A bit out of touch 08:20  |  Hashem 22/09/08

Read & React Olmert hands in his formal resignation to President Peres Responses: 88 Report: Palestinian woman dies after shoved to the ground by IDF troops Responses: 240 Hamas accuses Israel of back-pedaling in Shalit negotiations Responses: 124 Ex-IDF chief: Military confrontation with Iran is unavoidable Responses: 165 Yossi Sarid: Economic crisis forces us to rethink 'American dream' Responses: 108 More Headlines 08:18 Livni offers Barak 'full partnership' in new gov't 08:19 ANALYSIS / Ehud Olmert is a victim of his own greed 08:20 Iran 'galloping toward a nuclear bomb,' military intelligence chief says 08:27 Hamas slams PA threat to use force to regain control of Gaza 22:53 Iranian groups to stage rally in N.Y. titled 'Ahmadinejad, why do you execute children?' 03:35 IDF rejects claim it caused woman's death by shoving her to ground 06:18 Paul McCartney mania leaves all but a few Israeli artists at home 04:07 Tel Aviv stocks soar after gloomy week thanks to Bush plan, Wall St. gains 05:55 Report: Number of doctors and nurses in Israel in sharp decline 05:57 Indictments postponed again in Rose Pizem murder 06:07 Ministry disqualifies exam after Haredi school bars proctor for 'immodest attire' 06:10 Shelters revamped by interfaith group vandalized in north 06:16 Non-profits alarmed by rising food insecurity Previous Editions Select Day 21 sep 19 sep 18 sep 17 sep 16 sep 15 sep 14 sep 12 sep 11 sep 10 sep 09 sep 08 sep

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