The opening credits of Persepolis (2007) feature a flower moving across the screen, travelling through the different places depicted during the titles. This quite simple feature helps to introduce the audience to the main premise of the film - moving; mobility; change and growth. Marjane Satrapi’s film debut Persepolis (2007), made together with Vincent Paronnaud, is an autobiography based on Satrapi’s similarly titled graphic novel. This French-Iranian animated film deals with the subject of change, displacement and mobility. Persepolis documents the growth of Marji, an Iranian girl living amidst war and chaos, in a country battling for its identity the same way Marji does during the course of the film. Mid-film she moves to Vienna where she
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This quote can be easily applied to Marji. Not only is she in constant movement in the physical sense, but her character is kept in motion in metaphorical sense as well. During the film she grows, moves from a little girl to a young adult, a transformation that is only made that much worse in a place that is foreign. Going through puberty is an alienating process on its own – going through that much change in such a short amount of time is disorienting and asks a lot of a person. When Marji is sent to Vienna she is on the cusp of her puberty, but the changes she will be going through are not limited to her body – changes in scenery and cultural practice come at the same time. This leaves Marji feeling displaced, something that William Anselmi and Sheena Wilson discuss in their essay (2015: 233). In Persepolis Marji moves from being an Iranian to being an Iranian exile in Austria. These two identities are very different even though Marji is able to maintain some sort of a link to her homeland – although even that is being questioned once when she claims to be from France in order to achieve a more desirable cultural identity. Then after Marji returns to Iran, she finds that she is unable to go back to her former Iranian identity as the …show more content…
The main story is Marji looking back on her life and bringing up the good and the bad. People around her cling to old stories and retell them to willing audiences. In her article Gilbried references to a fact that the words nostalgia means “I return” (2011: 145). Returning means moving back and that is what Marji is doing in the film. She wallows in certain type of nostalgia, returning to her childhood and reliving those memories as she tries to regain her identity. During the third act Marji’s father reminiscences fondly how he was able to hold Marji’s mothers hand in public while they were dating, something Marji is unable to do in the Iran she lives in. Marji embodies nostalgia as she, but so does the country of Iran and its people as they go on about their daily
This quote can be easily applied to Marji. Not only is she in constant movement in the physical sense, but her character is kept in motion in metaphorical sense as well. During the film she grows, moves from a little girl to a young adult, a transformation that is only made that much worse in a place that is foreign. Going through puberty is an alienating process on its own – going through that much change in such a short amount of time is disorienting and asks a lot of a person. When Marji is sent to Vienna she is on the cusp of her puberty, but the changes she will be going through are not limited to her body – changes in scenery and cultural practice come at the same time. This leaves Marji feeling displaced, something that William Anselmi and Sheena Wilson discuss in their essay (2015: 233). In Persepolis Marji moves from being an Iranian to being an Iranian exile in Austria. These two identities are very different even though Marji is able to maintain some sort of a link to her homeland – although even that is being questioned once when she claims to be from France in order to achieve a more desirable cultural identity. Then after Marji returns to Iran, she finds that she is unable to go back to her former Iranian identity as the …show more content…
The main story is Marji looking back on her life and bringing up the good and the bad. People around her cling to old stories and retell them to willing audiences. In her article Gilbried references to a fact that the words nostalgia means “I return” (2011: 145). Returning means moving back and that is what Marji is doing in the film. She wallows in certain type of nostalgia, returning to her childhood and reliving those memories as she tries to regain her identity. During the third act Marji’s father reminiscences fondly how he was able to hold Marji’s mothers hand in public while they were dating, something Marji is unable to do in the Iran she lives in. Marji embodies nostalgia as she, but so does the country of Iran and its people as they go on about their daily