Festival Albertine Preview, Oct. 18: A Conversation between Marjane Satrapi and A. O. Scott

The graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi and the critic A.O. Scott will take up questions of creativity and criticism, censorship and audience, the tension between the visual and the word, and much more that could hardly be fixed in advance. (Starts at 3 PM.)

Marjane Satrapi, one of the great uncategorizable artists of our time, grew up in Tehran in the 1970s but left in 1983 as a teenager to study at the Lycée Français in Vienna; she now lives in Strasbourg. Her autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis (2000-2003) was a sensation when it was published in four parts in France over 2000-2003, and gained an international audience when as co-writer and co-director (with Vincent Paronnaud) Satrapi adapted it into the animated film of the same name—bringing in, for the French version, the voices of Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, and Simon Abkarin, and for the English version Gena Rowlands, Sean Penn, and Iggy Pop, all of whom sounded thrilled to follow Satrapi’s childhood in Iran and her adventures on the streets of Europe. She has also published the graphic novels Broderies(Embroideries, 2003) and Poulet aux prunes (Chicken with Plums, 2004), again with Paronnaud, filmed in 2011.

A. O. Scott has been chief film critic for the New York Timessince 2004. He is Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University, and the author of two forthcoming books, one of which may be called Better Living Through Criticism and one of which, a collection of film writing, will definitely be titledWhat I Thought I Saw.

Steve Wasserman is editor at large for Yale University Press. In his nine years as editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, when the Los Angeles Times had a book review, he made it into one of the more challenging and fully realized literary journals in the United States. He has worked as a book publisher, a literary agent, and an op-ed editor. He is co-founder of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and currently teaches at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.