Historical Script

Artists' Statement 

In Satrapi’s The Veil, Satrapi is forced to wear a veil she is not used to as her country as her government seeks to establish a new order. For Satrapi, so much of her history – of her country’s Cultural Revolution – is of veils, of hiding behind things. Satrapi dons a veil and dons another figurative one as she pretends to want to be a doctor, not a prophet; her mother must disguise herself to avoid trouble.

Meike and Angela hide behind a variety of veils during their own revolution: the Iconoclastic Fury, or Beeldenstorm. Entoen.nu, a website developed by the Committee on Development of the Dutch Canon and managed by Hubert Slings of the Dutch Open Air Museum, speaks of the Netherlands’ own cultural revolution. “The Calvinists [a branch of Protestantism] believed the [Catholic] Church had to be purified of “papist superstitions”. By…smashing images of saints, they aimed to rid these Catholic symbols of their mystical value and make clear that Catholicism had been twisted into a sacrilegious puppet show of the true faith…the Calvinists believed they were restoring ties with the earlier, in their eyes more pure, Christians.”

            Meike and Angela’s involvement in Beeldenstorm forces them to hide under cover of night and hold secretive church services in their home. Even in Meike’s coffee shop, Angela first hides in a cloud of smoke. Like Satrapi’s mother and sometimes even Satrapi herself, Meike and Angela are liberal, independent women who fight for freedom. In Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, Russell Shorto defines liberalism: “Historically, then, liberalism involves a commitment to individual freedom and individual rights, and not just for oneself but for everyone, every human being who breathes the air.”

            Meike and Angela, then, are two liberal women in a world slowly changing, a world of idols and smashing them. They come to live forever by saving the painting of the Virgin Mary, an act symbolic of true liberalism and representative of the colliding chaos of their time. In the present day, they remain the same kind of women. Meike owns a coffee shop named Gedogen, a Dutch term which translates to “technically illegal but officially tolerated”. The painting of Mary hangs on the wall, remembering a different side of the past, next to the landscapes that represent the sea of change that came out of Beeldenstorm.

            In the script, art heavily affects ideology, but in the writing of the script, ideology heavily influenced art. Reading Shorto’s book is what inspired the script in the first place, and it was important that Meike and Angela embraced the liberalism that so characterizes their city. The sources helped us understand the importance of art, and so we applied that to the script to symbolize the complexities of the two situations and times. The result is art that hopes to convey not just a story, but a time, a city, and an idea.