The passing of Marjane Satrapi – who her family say “died of sadness” a year after the tragic loss of her husband, Swedish actor Mattias Ripa – would have hit fans hard at any time. The world has lost a visionary creator, and a powerful voice for change – who at 56, surely had so much more to give. But at a time when a crumbling establishment is looking to divorce art and politics from humanity, it is voices like hers which are more important than ever.
I remain eternally grateful to Marjane Satrapi for her work. I read Persepolis in my first weeks of university.
Settling into new environments always proved a challenge for me in my youth – and while many people enjoy the move to university as an opportunity for reinvention among a new crowd, it was a profoundly lonely time for me. In the pages of Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel, however, I found a surprising refuge.
Charting the course of her life over two books, Satrapi’s story provides remarkable levels of insight and political nuance through both her growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran as life becomes increasingly restrictive; and her life as a student in Vienna, struggling with culture shock and xenophobia in a Europe that is not quite the land of freedom and tolerance it is cracked up to be. This is, obviously, a much more severe set of circumstances than I was handling, as a white man studying at a university in the country (and country) of his birth. But the power of Satrapi’s art and words is that she manages to both be a compelling illumination of a life I have not lived, and a universal exploration of personal and political alienation, which can transcend the artificial divisions of nationality and race, and be entirely relatable to someone living an almost completely different life.
In part, that comes from the character design – Satrapi using black-and-white drawings rather than colourful depictions of her history, to encourage readers to focus on similarities, rather than focus on superficial, “exotic” differences between the locations and communities displayed. In a world where those superficial differences are drilled into our minds from day one, simplifying the visuals to a more abstract form makes it easier for a mass audience to relate to the characters directly. And also, we see how any other country might become more like totalitarian Iran, or how life in the ‘free West’ often already comes with ideological trappings all of its own. In a world where ordinary citizens of Iran had long been demonised – and in a world where an illegal war is once again casting them as one-dimensional villains – that is a revolutionary achievement.
This style, and the medium of graphic novels as a whole, also proved fruitful for when it came to adapting it for film – in part serving as a storyboard for the Persepolis movie, which would go on to be nominated at Cannes and the Academy Awards. And it is another reason that Satrapi should be so keenly missed now. It illustrates the importance of the art of storyboarding – and the reality that great cinema is a combination of a multitude of arts, which diminishes when any one of them is neglected.
One of Hollywood’s most respected directors has just cashed in his credibility for the LinkedIn scam that is AI storyboarding. Martin Scorsese says this allows him to cut out the annoyance of storyboarding his work – and get his views translated to the screen more rapidly. For a man of his considerable wealth and clout to say he would rather abolish a form of art than pay someone else to do it would already be condemnable. For someone in their 80s to kick away the ladder for other people trying to make it in the industry (in stark contrast to Satrapi, who in the wake of her husband’s passing, set up the Mattias and Marjane Ripa-Satrapi Cinema Foundation as a way to provide support for foreign students who want to study filmmaking in Paris), by endorsing a technology he in reality will not have to live with the consequences with, would be perverse. But it also completely misunderstands a medium Scorsese has lived high and wide on being a supposed purist of.
Creating a film should not be a rapid process. The quicker you speed through it, the less thought you put into it, the more superficial and uncaring the end-product becomes. By throwing storyboarding – arduous as a process or not – under the bus, Scorsese has announced open season on any form of the process which could be ‘streamlined’ for the sake of time and money – but which actually require artists to more consciously create art as a means of communication.
If producers and directors can steam through a shoot, with AI tools babying them through pre-production, the art of a Persepolis will be lost. Having to extensively visualise things for yourself, to think how an audience might engage with them, how your message may be enhanced or lost according to every frame or panel.
It is cliché to quote Akira Kurosawa, but also necessary here:
For me, film-making combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films painting and literature, theatre and music come together.
Satrapi’s legacy stands testament to that – an example of the way an art form that sad old men now bill as a nuisance, remains essential to emphasising a story’s core themes, and of retaining the humanity of its subjects. In a time when that humanity is under assault from business and state interests, in art and in daily life, it is a legacy that is all the more important to remember.
