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we began class by taking a look at peoples responses to the movie Persepolis - the class seemed to have similar reactions in terms of concepts and things like the fact that the movie was in french, the soundtrack it had, the addition of movement, lack of borders and its play with colour.

what the class did not seem to agree on however was whether the role of an adaptation (the movie was one of the book)  was to preserve the original - a discusion which presented itself in bits and pieces throughout the class.

aybala50 enjoyed the music in the movie - she said it added a layer to the experience which the book couldnt do. she also thought that it gave the movie more direction because the film maker could control how we felt through this soundtrack.

mkarol 's favorite scene in the movie was when margie sings the eye of the tiger  - she said it made the mvie more real and that she liked the fact that satrapi and sung it herself.

on the other hand, the movie made xhan feel more sad, according to her, watching the story on screen 'haunted' her more -- this was enhanced by the fact that she couldnt seem to find a sense of finality in the movie.

jrlewis commented on the experience of watching the movie with someone vs that of reading a book alone --  there were simultaneously different interpreations and experiences.

nk0825 said the movie was more superficial, according to her, the pace of the movie and the constant movement glazed over things. spleenfiend agreed with her and said that she normally felt cheated by graphic novels because there werent enought pictures or words but in the case of persepolis, she spent more time on the novel, reading and re reading it but the movie seemed condensed.

spleenfiend things movies should do something artistically new.

the class then shifted and we moved on to a question that mkarol had posted a while ago -- 'does a story change with the addition of sound and audio?'

as a response to this, we watched 'a waking life' -- a cinematic art form, in which the protagonist is a man who is permanently in a lucid dream state.

once we watched it, we picked up on the concept of holy moments from it. a holy moment being a moment in which you recognise that every moment in time is wonderful and horrible and a lot of things mixed together and that we are never present in the moment to be fully open to it.

the point made in the clip was that films can give this to you, they can absorb you into themeselves in a manner so fully as to give you a moment like the above.

mkarol, who had brought us to the clip and to the question, then said that 'the best films arent slaves to the narratives, instead they know how to include and work with the actors who make it.'

keeping the movie and mkarols comment in mind, we spoke about whether we had any holy moments in persepolis and what they were

TPB1988: when margies grandmother takes off her bra and they lie bed together and the flowers fall.

rachelr: when margie sees her dad carrying her mom at the airport.

rmeyers and teal then brought up an interesting point - about how things can seem to be more real not represented than represented. to support their claim, they gave us the example of margie when she looks at her friends body pieces and the difference in the manner in which its presented in the movie and in the book.
 

anne then changed the direction of the course and brought up an interesting ancestor to persepolis - a movie called metropolis. the movie is an infamous, futuristic, dystopic urban reality.

we watched three clips of the movie followed by an interview with satrapi.

the interview was interesting -- in it she expressed her views about humor and horror and how for her, making people laugh was harder than creating something which scared or appauled them. another interesting thing that came up in her interview was the fact that she wrote the book at a distance - all the events and occurances described in the book made her feel - she was angry and upset and excited, but while writing, she didnt want any of those emotions to influence how she actually felt and what she thought.

after the interview we saw Persepolis 2.0 -- a book written by two iranian boys to show the recent political happenings in iran. theyve used the original pictures from persepolis and just changed the text.

just when the class was ending was we had another intersting idea thrown at us -- that you need a reader to prove you're alive. and that stories were meant to be shared.

we ended the class with an open question - can we draw analogies between BMC and sex segregation in the middle east?