Welcome back, readers, to another entry in the Hard Light Newsletter. This one will operate a little differently with only one “preview” and no reviews or “what we’re into” segments because we have an exciting announcement! Many of you have been asking for a way to further support us as we strive to move from micro-cinema to a real movie theater, and now we’ve created a way: The Hard Light Picture Club!
The Hard Light Picture Club will be a tiered membership program that will allow you all to get some extra perks when coming to our normally-scheduled Hard Light events, receive extra written content by way of paid members-only newsletters, access a curated rental-library of all types of movies on physical formats, and even have your own events in addition to our normally-scheduled films. We’ve brought you two films a month over the past seven months, but we’re adding a third movie in June, and we have some exciting partnerships coming up in the fall that will allow us to add to our already diverse programming. By becoming a Hard Light Picture Club member, you help us license under-seen arthouse and international films to show in the community as we strive to open a physical location.
The membership program will be a tiered one with different perks at the first two tiers and then just different titles for the higher tiers. This is similar to the model at many smaller theaters and will allow those who are financially able to support us with larger gifts without locking out some of our other patrons from different benefits. So let’s take a quick look at the tiers below:
Supporter ($5 / month)
–Newsletter exclusives: In addition to our biweekly newsletter, we’ll be releasing some long-form articles on a specific topic. Sometimes they’ll be more personal (how we became movie fans, our favorite theatrical experiences, our childhood rental stores, etc) and other times more academic (an exploration of the transcendental in cinema, an overview of the Taiwanese New Wave, a breakdown of Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography).
–Your name in the Hard Light Wall of Fame: We want to appreciate you, our members, by cementing your name in stone (pixels). We’ll have an online wall of fame on our website, and we’ll have one on the slideshows before our movies. Join early and get your name there near the front of the list!
–Discounts on Concessions and Merchandise: 25% off of our concessions at screenings and 10% off of merchandise; posters for now but more merch on its way!
–Free Popcorn at Studio Two Three Screenings: We’ve done this in the past with any donation and this counts as a donation! Thanks for supporting us.
Member ($10 / month)
–Access to our new Hard Light Rental Library: We in the Hard Light staff are huge fans of physical media, and we want to share our collection with you! We’ll have several shelves of rentals at all of our events where you can borrow either 1 or 2 films for free! Return the movie in a month (or two! Just let us know because we’d hate to lose parts of our collection!) at one of our movie events, at special rental events at some of our favorite places in town, or DM and we’ll make something work. The collection will have Criterions, arthouse classics, your dad’s favorite TNT film by Michael Mann or Tony Scott, obscure Scorsese films, niche noirs, 80s or 90s hits on VHS, and a Luchino Visconti or two. Trust us, you’ll find something. The current collection is on a Letterboxd list, but it’ll be growing as we find out how much interest there is in the collection and what movies get “rented” often. Check it out here.
–A free small poster each month: We love our posters. Y’all love our posters. We’d love for y’all to have our posters! Come to one of our movies and get a free small poster for that movie each month. Don’t love that event’s poster? Can’t make either event? Let us know and we have some in the archives for you to choose from!
–Invitations to Member’s Only Events: We’re all movie-lovers but sometimes, as you may have read about in our “What We’re Into” segments, we do other non-movie things. We’d like to invite you to join in on some of those things. Hard Light potlucks, dance parties, coffee hangs, wine chillers, and more! We’ve gotten to know a lot of you at movie events, and we’d love to hang out more at special non-movie events!
–And all of the perks from the Supporter Tier!
Producer ($20 / month)
-All of the perks above, a cool title, and the knowledge that you’re helping cool movies be screened in your city.
Executive Producer ($40 / month)
-All of the perks above, a cooler title, and the knowledge that you’re helping even more cool movies be screened in your city.
Big Wig ($80 / month)
-All of the perks above, the coolest title by far, and the knowledge that you’re doing so so much to help us. We’re a small group but we put a lot of work into this, so your gift truly means so so much.
We’re very excited to share this next step in Hard Light Cinema’s journey with you all and hope you’re able to join us in our journey by becoming a member today! You can join at our new membership hub here.
Persepolis (dir. Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi) – Lewis Peterson
From 2000 to 2003, over the course of 4 installments, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis was published in the French magazine L’Association. Drawing on her childhood in Iran and Austria, Satrapi’s series was met with both commercial and critical success on an international scale. Persepolis found its way into public school curricula, best of the decade lists, and in 2007, the silver screen. At a time when animated films were shifting to 3D styles and comic book adaptations strictly referred to superheroes, Persepolis (directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud) defied all expectations of how animated films should be made and marketed.
In contrast to the average major studio animated film, Persepolis was made with a team of only 20 animators, and featured traditional animation (i.e., hand drawn) techniques to capture Satrapi’s art style. Heavily inspired by German Expressionist Woodblock art, as well as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Satrapi’s book and film features an incredibly simplistic and largely black & white style that is meant to drive home the universality of the film’s characters and plot.
When Satrapi and the producers were in the early stages of planning the film, Satrapi was steadfast that they would not make a movie about an exoticized place that would simply be a far off notion in the mind of its western audiences. By grounding the movie in this style, Satrapi hoped to avoid making a film that emphasized the foreign and instead emphasized the familiar. While the circumstances surrounding her youth were marked by the political turmoil of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a familiarity with 20th century Iranian history isn’t needed to approach Satrapi’s story. Though her life is shaped by Iran’s political climate (she’s 10 when the Revolution happens, and grows up in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war), Satrapi’s work tries to push back on the false notions of Iran that many westerners have due to media depictions of Iran and the Middle East at large. “I’ve been justifying why it isn’t negative to be Iranian for almost 20 years. How strange when it isn’t something I did or chose to be?”
Marjane, or Marji, as she’s known by her family, is a typical rebellious young girl. She gets in trouble for listening to punk rock and metal music, she talks back to authority figures, she sneaks a cigarette when she can. Her family encourages her education with Communist leanings and a strong belief in independent thinking. “I read a lot and nothing was forbidden. I read a book about Che Guevara when I was 9 and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights when I was 10. I read Jean-Paul Sartre when I was 11 or 12; I didn’t understand all of it.”
This supportive family unit not only laid the foundation for Satrapi’s education, but also served as the basis for her book and eventual film. Her grandmother, mother, father, and uncle all loom large in her story, adding to the rich constellation of memories, imparted wisdoms, and images that make up this film. It’s easy to see why Satrapi had so much trouble leaving her homeland and her family. There’s a great deal of love and tenderness on display in Satrapi’s story, as well as internal family strife that gives Persepolis its strong emotional center. All of which serves Satrapi’s greater aim: to humanize Iranians and show the complexity of their lives in the late 20th and early 21st century.
Upon its release, Persepolis the film met with a similar response to the book of the same name with critics and audiences alike greeting the film with warmth. After its success, Satrapi became the first woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Her work has continued, with several adventures into live action territory and other published works.
So join us at Hard Light’s upcoming screening of Persepolis, a collaboration with BubblesCon, on May 25th at 7:30PM (doors at 7PM) at Studio Two Three. RSVP and find more information here.
What’s Up Next?
May 25th: Persepolis w/ BubblesCon at Studio Two Three.
May 26th: Our next Hard Light newsletter!
June 12th: Another exciting Hard Light screening. Details to come!
Hard Light Cinema 