Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir, Persepolis—released in the United States in 2003—was a clear-eyed, sensitive portrayal of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, seen through the eyes of a young girl. Now Satrapi’s stark, inky images have been “remixed” with new text to tell the story of the recent disputed elections in Iran—ending with the death of Neda Agha-Soltan.

According to Agence France-Presse, the remixers behind the ten-page “Persepolis 2.0” are two young Iranians raised in the West and now living in Shanghai, who watched the elections from abroad:

"Persepolis 2.0" has also been "vigorously" attacked in the ultraconservative press in Iran, its authors say.

"We consider this to be a good sign," they said, adding that the site itself was secure and had not been hacked into.

But Satrapi—who gave the authors her go-ahead for the project but was not otherwise involved—told AFP she was sceptical about its power to change the situation on the ground in Iran.

"They said they wanted to do something with my work -- I gave them my blessing."

(Via ArtsBeat.)

Tags: graphic novel, iran, neda, persepolis

Hanna is right about the Neda video. We really don’t have any idea what it records, except a young woman bleeding to death in the street. And ultimately that’s what is most arresting about the film: the experience of watching someone die. Like so many others, my reaction to it has been visceral. The first time I saw it, I burst into tears. Later, I focused on the whites of her eyes, the blood streaming from her mouth.

My interest in these details has nothing to do with my support for the protesters in Iran or my anger at her assassin, and it says absolutely nothing about who that assassin might be. It springs from my awareness of the vulnerability of the human body, and my physical empathy with this particular body in the moment it becomes a corpse. Meghan gets at this when she writes that the sight of Neda dying “is so difficult to hold in the mind that we have to transform it,” and that in making Neda’s death stand for more than the death of a single young women, we “rob it of meaning.” This is the same problem we encounter when we mix art, which captures the reality of life and death, with politics, whose aims are far more utilitarian. I don’t mean to suggest that the Neda video is art. But like art, it captures a profoundly significant moment in human existence, and that’s why it moves us. It’s the record of an individual death, not a revolutionary struggle.

On a purely journalistic level, as Hanna notes, nothing in the e-mail Sullivan posted or the LA Times story confirms that a Basij sniper shot Neda Agha-Soltan. The doctor’s account is just one of many that would be weighed in an investigation, and his e-mail appears saturated with the residual drama of the moment (the sniper aiming straight for her heart), to say nothing of how hard it is to know where a bullet originates in the midst of a street demonstration.

There’s undoubtedly more to the story than we know, and if we’re lucky, more details will emerge in time. But now that millions of people have watched this young woman die on YouTube, I’d like to suggest something radical: Let’s back off. Privacy was not something Neda enjoyed in her final moments, but this death is hers, not ours. The violent end of a life is a powerful thing to see, whether it happens on a street in Tehran or in Washington, D.C. In our attempts to magnify its importance, let’s not make it less than what it is.

Photograph of a vigil in New York City by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

Tags: andrew sullivan, iran, Iranian election, neda

Hanna is right about the Neda video. We really don’t have any idea what it records, except a young woman bleeding to death in the street. And ultimately that’s what is most arresting about the film: the experience of watching someone die. Like so many others, my reaction to it has been visceral. The first time I saw it, I burst into tears. Later, I focused on the whites of her eyes, the blood streaming from her mouth.

My interest in these details has nothing to do with my support for the protesters in Iran or my anger at her assassin, and it says absolutely nothing about who that assassin might be. It springs from my awareness of the vulnerability of the human body, and my physical empathy with this particular body in the moment it becomes a corpse. Meghan gets at this when she writes that the sight of Neda dying “is so difficult to hold in the mind that we have to transform it,” and that in making Neda’s death stand for more than the death of a single young women, we “rob it of meaning.” This is the same problem we encounter when we mix art, which captures the reality of life and death, with politics, whose aims are far more utilitarian. I don’t mean to suggest that the Neda video is art. But like art, it captures a profoundly significant moment in human existence, and that’s why it moves us. It’s the record of an individual death, not a revolutionary struggle.

On a purely journalistic level, as Hanna notes, nothing in the e-mail Sullivan posted or the LA Times story confirms that a Basij sniper shot Neda Agha-Soltan. The doctor’s account is just one of many that would be weighed in an investigation, and his e-mail appears saturated with the residual drama of the moment (the sniper aiming straight for her heart), to say nothing of how hard it is to know where a bullet originates in the midst of a street demonstration.

There’s undoubtedly more to the story than we know, and if we’re lucky, more details will emerge in time. But now that millions of people have watched this young woman die on YouTube, I’d like to suggest something radical: Let’s back off. Privacy was not something Neda enjoyed in her final moments, but this death is hers, not ours. The violent end of a life is a powerful thing to see, whether it happens on a street in Tehran or in Washington, D.C. In our attempts to magnify its importance, let’s not make it less than what it is.

Photograph of a vigil in New York City by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

Tags: andrew sullivan, iran, Iranian election, neda

This week I chided Andrew Sullivan for posting an e-mail supposedly confirming the details of Neda’s death. Andrew Sullivan defends himself, saying the details in the e-mail are confirmed in this Los Angeles Times story. Since then, I’ve gotten dozens of e-mails from Sullivan fans asking me to apologize and run a correction. I politely decline. Neither the Los Angeles Times story, nor any of the news stories that ran yesterday confirm any details in that e-mail. Instead, they all just bolster my conviction that we are witnessing the creation of a myth, not the investigation of a murder.

The LA Times story confirms that she was shot, and there was a doctor on the scene. I could have told you that from the video. It doesn’t say anything about who killed her. Her singing instructor, who was with her that day, says he heard a shot and thinks it came from a rooftop. That is very different than what the doctor wrote in the e-mail, which is that a “basij” member “aimed straight at her heart.”

Myths get created even in real time; read the contemporaneous deathbed stories of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. Neda’s mother says she begged her daughter not go to the protests, and her daughter answered, “Don't worry. It's just one bullet and its over.” Again, I don’t begrudge them this mythology. A mother needs something to make sense of her grief. The street protesters need a sympathetic face, and Neda is ideal. But let’s just report it for what it is.

Photograph of Iranian protesters by Louisa Gouliamaki//AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: andrew sullivan, neda

This week I chided Andrew Sullivan for posting an e-mail supposedly confirming the details of Neda’s death. Andrew Sullivan defends himself, saying the details in the e-mail are confirmed in this Los Angeles Times story. Since then, I’ve gotten dozens of e-mails from Sullivan fans asking me to apologize and run a correction. I politely decline. Neither the Los Angeles Times story, nor any of the news stories that ran yesterday confirm any details in that e-mail. Instead, they all just bolster my conviction that we are witnessing the creation of a myth, not the investigation of a murder.

The LA Times story confirms that she was shot, and there was a doctor on the scene. I could have told you that from the video. It doesn’t say anything about who killed her. Her singing instructor, who was with her that day, says he heard a shot and thinks it came from a rooftop. That is very different than what the doctor wrote in the e-mail, which is that a “basij” member “aimed straight at her heart.”

Myths get created even in real time; read the contemporaneous deathbed stories of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. Neda’s mother says she begged her daughter not go to the protests, and her daughter answered, “Don't worry. It's just one bullet and its over.” Again, I don’t begrudge them this mythology. A mother needs something to make sense of her grief. The street protesters need a sympathetic face, and Neda is ideal. But let’s just report it for what it is.

Photograph of Iranian protesters by Louisa Gouliamaki//AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: andrew sullivan, neda

Anne Applebaum puts the Neda video in context, by forcefully arguing that women's rights advocates—not Bush or Obama or Twitter—are behind the incredible energy in the Iranian vote and the protests: "The truth is that the high turnout was the result of many years of organizational work carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and, above all, women's groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help." She also explains why the presence of so many women on the streets matters:

For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic republic is its claim to divine inspiration: The leadership is legitimate, and in particular its harsh repression of women is legitimate, because God has decreed that it is so. The outright rejection of this creed by tens of thousands of women, not just over the last weekend but over the last decade, has to weaken the Islamic republic's claim to invincibility in Iran and across the Middle East.

Dana, when you worried over the instrumentalizing of Neda's death, and what it means when a tape of one person bleeding her life out on the street catapults all around the world, and so becomes a propagranda tool, some of your commenters thought you were questioning the relevance of the death itself. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think you were making a subtler point—that no matter how relevant, Neda has been converted from a self into a symbol, and you wouldn't want that for yourself. I see that. I wonder, though, about calling the video a propaganda tool. (Snuff film just seems right, since that's literally what it is.) For sure the video is being circulated to send a message and stoke the fires of outrage, but the nature of its dissemination makes me think that calling it a propaganda tool for me is too unsympathetic. The man who sent it doesn't sound like he works for anyone. He sounds like a guy who smuggled his footage through the Iranian cyberspace censors, however he could, to get it viewed. YouTube and Twitter and CNN did the rest. If the video is propaganda, it isn't only that. It's also a collective howl. Impotent and even exploitative, but also a heartfelt expression of the hive mind.

Photograph of Iranian protesters by Louisa Gouliamaki/Getty Images.

Tags: women's rights; Iran; Neda video

Dana, Susannah: Like many Americans, I watched the “Neda video” yesterday. This is, of course, a horribly shorthand way of saying that I opened a video clip that captures a young Iranian woman dying after being shot. The movie is short. It is “graphic,” if by graphic we mean that we see blood, and the violence that can be done to a body. More subtly, and entirely fascinatingly (in the old, sober sense of the world), it captures the moment a person’s life drains out of her body. I have, in the past, always decided not to watch videos like this (Danny Pearl’s execution, say). This time I changed my mind, and it haunted me all last night.

Why has Neda become a symbol of Iranian freedom? Because we witness the sight of her death. That sight, even at a remove (or perhaps because at a remove), is so difficult to hold in mind that we have to transform it. Ironically, I think, even as many genuinely try to honor the random violence of her death by making it representative of “freedom,” they rob it of meaning. In reducing it to a symbol, it becomes monolithic rather than intimate. Perhaps that’s what you mean, Dana, when you ask whether this is a “snuff” video, and Susannah, when you say it is. Certainly, it's an artifact that turns a single individual’s death into an example. Neda, as many newspapers reported, was, according to her friends and family, not political. She stepped out of the car to get a breath of air. She was a casualty of conflict. What does that mean? Does it mean anything?

As it happens, I was just reading art critic T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death. Near the end, he writes, “I think we hide, necessarily, from an understanding of what is most to be avoided in the sight of death.” Then he diagnoses “the confusion of mind that human beings experience in the presence of a corpse. Different, and largely unconscious, worlds of inference are set in motion, working full speed, colliding with one another. Corpses are (still) persons. They are people we cannot help treating, at one level, as entities with wishes, fears, awareness, sadness, maybe depths of despair." This, it strikes me, is what has happened to Neda; the mystery and horror one feels at watching Neda’s face go still in the YouTube clip have been transformed to a profound identification with her humanity, if not her selfhood.

Photograph of Iranian protesters by Mark Ralston/Getty Images.

Tags: iran, Neda video, snuff movie, youtube

Yes, Dana, you're absolutely right that the Neda video, in which a young Iranian woman is shot and killed during the post-election protests, is a snuff movie. "And the fact that 'Neda' is a young and pretty woman" has absolutely played a part in the YouTube clip's rise to infamy. This isn't to diminish the content of it. It is a horrifying, saddening, frantic look at a woman dying in the street.

But I don't think that's exactly what we're talking about here. We're talking about the something else the video becomes when its focus and attendant narrative take on the qualities of martyr and myth. The video becomes something else altogether, something that, more often than not, is more about us than the subject itself.

We watch the video not purely for political reasons, but also because we are curious. About life, and death, and what happened. And in that, it becomes a form of entertainment. We fetishize it, its story, and its characters. And it's fair to wonder about why we do that, what purpose that serves. The vitriolic comments Dana's post received suggest that some are hell-bent on holding on to one meaning of the story. But it's not that simple. The video itself spawns a collective narrative through which we all speak in myriad, conflicting voices.

No, like a "true" snuff movie, the video was not created for the purpose of entertainment. Although why it was created, at least for now, remains something of a mystery. One man stood over Neda and videotaped her while she died. Somebody else uploaded it to the Internet. Now, we disseminate it. It plays before our eyes, enigmatic, and we imbue it with meaning.

It reminds me a bit of the character of Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, a dead girl whom everybody fetishized, in death more so than in life.

Photograph of Iranian protester by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: iran, iran election, youtube

Hanna, thank you for the necessary astringency of your last post about the "Neda" video and the construction of a martyr mythology in the blogosphere’s reporting on Iran. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the entire unedited Neda video on YouTube; it feels too close to a snuff movie. Assuming this graphic clip really does document a young woman’s death at the hands of paramilitary snipers—something we lack the reporting to confirm—what gives us the right to watch it and forward to and fro as proof of our solidarity with the forces of democracy and reform in Iran (something that, as you point out, Mousavi is far from representing)? I wouldn’t want my own death, or that of someone I loved, to be instrumentalized in that way. (We don't, for example, treat the deaths of U.S. soliders abroad as YouTube-able moments.) And the fact that “Neda” is a young and pretty woman somehow adds to the ickiness of disseminating the scene of her murder (if that is indeed what the clip shows) as a propaganda tool.

There’s a quote from a Harvard professor billing himself as an “expert on the Internet” that appeared in two different NYT pieces on Iran last week: “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful.” Power plus half-baked inanity make for a perilous combination, which is why I can’t help but be wary of the #iranelection fervor that’s been swelling my Twitter feed for the past week. The popular uprising in Iran has been thrilling to witness, and new technologies like Twitter are exciting both as tools for evading censorship on the ground and as platforms for citizen journalism abroad. But however freely flowing, information is only valuable insofar as it can be trusted. Western sympathizers convinced they’re manning the virtual barricades by turning their Twitter avatar photos green, resetting their locations to “Tehran,” and feverishly forwarding a graphic unsourced video of a young girl’s death strike me as both touchingly enthusiastic and dangerously inane.

Photograph of Iranian protesters by David McNew/Getty Images.

Tags: iran election, Neda video, twitter

Andrew Sullivan posts this e-mail today under the headline “Confirming the Basij Murder of Neda.” The video, for those who haven’t seen it, is graphic and disturbing. The e-mail Sullivan points to, however, confirms nothing. It claims to be from a doctor who treated her on the scene. He says he clearly saw a “basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house.” He also says “he had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her.” It’s hardly believable that in the chaos of the crowd, this doctor could have been looking at the rooftop the moment before the shot. He then says, in what is obvious rhetorical flourish: “He aimed straight at her heart.”

I do not begrudge this “doctor” his narrative. But it should not be reported by respectable American news sites as confirmation of a fact. It is an artifact in the construction of a martyr story, just like everything else in the story of Neda: Her name, which means “voice” in Farsi (now silenced), her age, first reported as 16, but actually 27, the final close-up of her face, blood streaming from her mouth, one eye opened.

In their excitement over the role of technology in building democracy, American sites have been gullibly reporting every Twitter and post in support of Mir Hussein Moussavi, conveniently forgetting Moussavi’s own bloody past. Even in the age of Twitter, confirming a murder is not something we do by e-mail.

Photograph of Iranian-American protesters by David McNew/Getty Images.

Tags: andrew sullivan, iranian revolution