Bill Randall

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I had the pleasure of watching Persepolis with an audience the other day. Other than the energy of watching in a room full of people, a couple of things struck me:

1) The animation was delightfully old-fashioned. Yes, economics made them use computers. To my eyes, all computer-aided animation looks like either paper cutout (2D) or puppet (3D) animation, technically impressive but hardly a leap forward. In Persepolis, however, the frame-to-frame shifting of scene and character, especially in the flights of fantasy, reminded me of the kind of animation, handmade, that best represents the medium. Giannalberto Bendazzi champions such works in his encyclopedic Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, works that make the world contingent between frames.  Much cooler than just building a drawn world and treating it like the real one.

2) Compared to the source book, which reads like a letter or diary, the film indulges much more in fantasy. For instance, the scene where Marjane dances from rooftop to rooftop plays as spectacle (never mind the crowd-pleasing “Eye of the Tiger” bit).  Film, I think, must have Vaudville built into its DNA, or else the chance to sing & dance in front of a crowd’s just too seductive.  These Persepolises are, of course, two different works, but I was surprised at how different.

Re-reading David B.’s L’Ascension du Haut-Mal (released in English as Epileptic), three images struck me.  The book concerns his family, burdened by his older brother’s crippling seizures; looking for a cure, his parents turned to macrobiotics and metaphysics.  David B. draws liberally on fantasy throughout, mixing childhood perceptions with spiritual maps and strange history.

1. He also includes his childhood art,  not that far removed from his adult work.  All children draw, usually until some too-harsh criticism makes them stop; at a young adolescent stage, they often focus on the detail at the expense of the whole.

This focus also characterizes the art of the mentally ill, repeating intricate patterns like fractals.

2. As the book progresses, the images increasingly give way to diagrams, which mix and flow into the normal world of David B.’s family.  These images, drawn largely from medieval symbology and occultism by modern esoteric sects, show the world as a map, populated by strange creatures.  So do the meridian systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine, as Jean-Christophe is early treated by an acupuncturist.  They echo the scientific progress of mapping the body, always with an eye to control; they never do.

3. Likewise, the adult David B., cocooning himself in lines and meridians, only with his own pattern.