Scott’s critique is based, in first instance, in the relationship between the experience and the methodological ways in which scholars tend to ignore the fact that experience is a social construct. Relating knowledge with vision might validate the experience without actually questioning it. Taking the evidence as truth is ignoring the fact that experience is a reinterpretation made by the subject that produces the discourse, and that discourse is made within specific ideological foundations. So after the speaking subject makes the first reinterpretation, then the historian makes a second reinterpretation based on the first one. For Scott, historicizing “experience” means taking into consideration the socially constructed nature of it. As she says: “Subjects are constituted discursively, but there are conflicts among discursive systems, contradictions within any one of them, multiple meaning possible for the concept they deploy. And subjects do have agency.” (Scott 409) For the author, experience needs to be considered as a mobile entity, and the study of it should respond to analysis of the product of the discourse that leads to the experience. For her, one should “take all categories of analysis as contextual, contested, and contingent” (411), rather than just revealing the experience and considering it as knowledge.
The rescue mission marks the pursuit of making the invisible enter discourse, but it seems limited as it just ennounces without really taking difference into account. Discourse turns the invisible into something tangible, into words that carry meaning. The problem is that enunciation is not enough, in the sense that it just makes visible without really exploring the reasons why an event or experience was marginalized (or not) in the first place. Rescuing the hidden history must necessarily involve a comprehension of the production of the social construct of the experience. For instance, historicizing “experience” should take into account the mechanisms of discourse .
Persepolis seems like a rescue mission type of story. In first instance, the movie appears as a memory rescue made by the leading character. The movement of enunciation is marked by the use of colored scenes. Marjane recalls her personal history when arriving at Orly Airport; she is not trying to rescue the memory of her community. But, why should she do so? She is negotiating her new identity in exile, trying to conceal her past as an Iranian upper class citizen, and her new status as the Other in a French community. The movie marks this process with the colors, and that same resource has been previously used in movies to emphasis important moments. For example, Schindler's List uses the color to highlight the girl in red:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3XfmSs69Hw&feature=related
In both movies color is used to emphasis in an important event. Persepolis is in the realm of experience, because memory is involved. But Marjane seems to forget important details that conforms her identity. As Hamid says in the movie review: “Their money and class protects them somewhat from both regimes, a fact which Satrapi does not call much attention in either the film or the graphic novel.” (62) She is a privilege child, with parents that tend to be liberal in comparison to their fellow citizens. She looks upon western civilization and tries to share common references, as music groups (Iron Maiden).
She makes a personal recount of her history, not trying to portray a universal history. The previous argument seems to go against what she says in the Making of Persepolis, but her experience is in fact a personal account. Trying to look to her message as a carrier of universal truth might lead into a problematic interpretation of the movie, because she is telling her particular story. Persepolis also gives a message of personal growth. At the end of the movie, she says that freedom comes with a cost. Not ever returning to a country that she was born into and never seeing her grandmother again is a great cost. But also there is another important cost, that might reveal an important (and maybe universal) meaning: going into exile has the cost of becoming the Other in a society that has its own social constructs. The recognition of it might seem the result of a personal and introspective search, but it portrays a more general meaning of undergoing exile.
The film engages in the graphic novel aesthetics and transports the visual language of the particular genre into film. There are two different levels of artificiality that can be taken into consideration for the analysis: the usage of animated characters and the discourse created by the editing process. The film, regardless of its animated nature, constructs and tries to imitate camera movements with the usage of close-ups, tilts, etc. The aesthetics can lead to the identification of three different frames or diegetic levels:
1. The original moment where she is recalling her past, that is marked by the use of color.
2. The past, in which personal memories have a consistency in the way they are represented. For instance, they all share a similar construction as seen in the following extract:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlsE39cjHts&feature=PlayList&p=48BF52EE9E1CE5E0&playnext_from=PL&playnext=2
3. The dream sequences or the puppet show performance, in which a particular construction is made.
Regardless of aesthetic variations, it respects the particularities of the graphic novel, making a symbiosis between two different languages.
The rescue mission marks the pursuit of making the invisible enter discourse, but it seems limited as it just ennounces without really taking difference into account. Discourse turns the invisible into something tangible, into words that carry meaning. The problem is that enunciation is not enough, in the sense that it just makes visible without really exploring the reasons why an event or experience was marginalized (or not) in the first place. Rescuing the hidden history must necessarily involve a comprehension of the production of the social construct of the experience. For instance, historicizing “experience” should take into account the mechanisms of discourse .
Persepolis seems like a rescue mission type of story. In first instance, the movie appears as a memory rescue made by the leading character. The movement of enunciation is marked by the use of colored scenes. Marjane recalls her personal history when arriving at Orly Airport; she is not trying to rescue the memory of her community. But, why should she do so? She is negotiating her new identity in exile, trying to conceal her past as an Iranian upper class citizen, and her new status as the Other in a French community. The movie marks this process with the colors, and that same resource has been previously used in movies to emphasis important moments. For example, Schindler's List uses the color to highlight the girl in red:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3XfmSs69Hw&feature=related
In both movies color is used to emphasis in an important event. Persepolis is in the realm of experience, because memory is involved. But Marjane seems to forget important details that conforms her identity. As Hamid says in the movie review: “Their money and class protects them somewhat from both regimes, a fact which Satrapi does not call much attention in either the film or the graphic novel.” (62) She is a privilege child, with parents that tend to be liberal in comparison to their fellow citizens. She looks upon western civilization and tries to share common references, as music groups (Iron Maiden).
She makes a personal recount of her history, not trying to portray a universal history. The previous argument seems to go against what she says in the Making of Persepolis, but her experience is in fact a personal account. Trying to look to her message as a carrier of universal truth might lead into a problematic interpretation of the movie, because she is telling her particular story. Persepolis also gives a message of personal growth. At the end of the movie, she says that freedom comes with a cost. Not ever returning to a country that she was born into and never seeing her grandmother again is a great cost. But also there is another important cost, that might reveal an important (and maybe universal) meaning: going into exile has the cost of becoming the Other in a society that has its own social constructs. The recognition of it might seem the result of a personal and introspective search, but it portrays a more general meaning of undergoing exile.
The film engages in the graphic novel aesthetics and transports the visual language of the particular genre into film. There are two different levels of artificiality that can be taken into consideration for the analysis: the usage of animated characters and the discourse created by the editing process. The film, regardless of its animated nature, constructs and tries to imitate camera movements with the usage of close-ups, tilts, etc. The aesthetics can lead to the identification of three different frames or diegetic levels:
1. The original moment where she is recalling her past, that is marked by the use of color.
2. The past, in which personal memories have a consistency in the way they are represented. For instance, they all share a similar construction as seen in the following extract:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlsE39cjHts&feature=PlayList&p=48BF52EE9E1CE5E0&playnext_from=PL&playnext=2
3. The dream sequences or the puppet show performance, in which a particular construction is made.
Regardless of aesthetic variations, it respects the particularities of the graphic novel, making a symbiosis between two different languages.
I really appreciate your thoughts and comments about Scott’s work and Persepolis. I also want to validate the connection you made to the importance of color for both Persepolis and for Schindler’s List. Though, I do wish to point out that, while both films use color to signify particular moments of the film, each utilizes color very differently. In Persepolis, the color notated a difference in time and space, yet didn’t have much to do with the meaty, juicy content of the film. Yet, in Schindler’s List, I feel like color was used more as a mechanism of the film’s narration. It pointed to the little girl and was used explicitly to communicate a particular point of plot to the audience and very specifically used to evoke emotion.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post!
I like your idea that Persepolis is a ‘memory rescue’ but that Marjane seems to ‘forget important details that conforms her identity’. Constructing an autobiography allows an individual to reconcile personal conflicts and at the same time contributes to the collective history in a sense that the autobiography will be referenced to by the future generation. Marjane achieves both through her graphic and animated Persepolis. It is, as the critique points out, a conscious reflection of her childhood both in the sense that she is now (re)interpreting her memory (her past interpretation of her experience), editing and translating them both visually (framing and colouring) and audibly (language and music). however, it is ironic that this seeming attempt to reconcile her present and past, her divided loyalty to Iranian and western influence is actually achieve by abstraction and simplification.
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ReplyDelete“But also there is another important cost, that might reveal an important (and maybe universal) meaning: going into exile has the cost of becoming the Other in a society that has its own social constructs.”
ReplyDeleteThis is such an interesting point, one that did not immediately come to my attention when watching the film. The structure of film calls for a story with a beginning, middle, and end, with some conflict in the middle that the character(s) must overcome. This is, of course, not how life actually is, and Italian neorealism developed in part as a response to that cinematic charade. I think presenting autobiography in this format is especially complex: Satrapi’s story is not complete or finished when the movie ends; rather, she is embarking on a part of her journey in which she will be the ‘other’ and will have a whole new set of challenges to overcome. I think the next chapters of her life in France are begging for cinematic representation!
I enjoyed reading your blog and I found it very interesting when you mentioned experience as discourse. I thought it a very interesting connection to a book I had read previously in my GWS 20 class named Herculine Barbine about a young transgender woman living in the 1800's. She lived her life as a female and was relatively confused for the majority of it and doctors were always finding a way of classifying her and forcing her into categories she did not fit into. Her biography included her own personal story of her life as well a medical discourse about her body and a type of media that talked about her unimportance social position. The term discourse is always very tricky because it doesn't matter whether the discourse is autobiographically written or in another person's perspective who hardly knew the person or is only considered in them as an object for their selfish research neccesities. The mere fact that if it wasnt for this book she would have remained invisible strikes me as a power struggle between science and life. The fact that Marjane's autobiography is also discourse makes me wonder who continues this power structure of allowing certain particular people to regard their life story as discourse.
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