Persepolis: Telling Tales of Trauma

Abstract

Animation has frequently engaged with trauma, whether depicting political oppression as seen in the work of Soviet film-makers such as Dmitry Babichenko or via the Disney studio portraying childhood loss. Persepolis continues the trend, including the link with children, by focussing on the autobiographical observations of the young Marjane Satrapi as she experiences the personal and collective traumas of being an Iranian girl growing up in the wake of the Islamic Revolution. Although the graphic novels on which the movie is based have been discussed in respect of trauma, the film has experienced less scrutiny. This chapter explores the film’s construction of history via collective and personal memory, with a focus on its malleability in relation to the recollection of trauma. From a perspective of exile, Persepolis visualises the network of collective memories that situate Marji as a witness to national traumatic events, whilst the communal rememberings coalesce with the localised experiences of the individual; in doing so, elements are forgotten, are too painful to articulate, or are rewritten. This process of erasure and renewal, I argue, manifests itself both within the text and intertextually. Moreover, the film’s aesthetic provides a representational strategy for this, with the animation medium central to the process of formalising competing histories of trauma, as it enables slippages between various states. Thus, I will set out its aesthetic of trauma, which appropriates the film’s fantastical and constructed features to seamlessly combine events, imaginings and memories from multiple storytellers; through such an arrangement, the film articulates the ways in which we negotiate pain and distress as lived experiences and so produces a testimony of the subjectivity of trauma.