Rushdie, with the help of his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, bares his scars in the days and weeks after being violently attacked, in this standard but comprehensive portrait of the writer’s life under fire. There’s nothing more distressing in “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie’ than the unflinching closeups of the author’s wounded body in the days and weeks after August 12, 2022, when he was repeatedly stabbed while on stage at a literary festival in upstate New York. The camera lingers over his mangled hand and the train-track of stitches running up his belly.
His right eye is a bloodied bulge. The power of Alex Gibney’s documentary, which premiered at Sundance, lies in Rushdie’s decision to showcase his scars — quite literally, by sharing footage that his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths shot throughout his time in the hospital. It’s a visceral complement to what is otherwise a solid, if standard, profile of the author from Gibney, the Oscar- and Emmy-winner known for churning out reliably comprehensive, reporter-style investigations of power and politics.
In Gibney’s upcoming “Musk,” an HBO-produced Elon Musk mega-doc that showed at Venice, the SpaceX and Tesla overlord is an AI-generated talking head. Thankfully no such uncanny simulations are in play here. The Indian-born writer has control of the mic from the get-go with running voiceover narration that starts the film alongside a feverish recreation of the attack visualized from Rushdie’s point of view: Blinding stage lights turn his assailant, a New Jersey man by the name of Hadi Matar, into a shadowy mass, and each jab of the knife is heard as a fleshy thud.
Matar is only mentioned by name once. In Rushdie’s retelling, he becomes a symbol for the punishing incursions upon his life and liberties since the publication of his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” scandalized the masses and put a target on his head, courtesy of a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, then the Supreme ruler of Iran. Wondering why he didn’t fight back or run away, Rushdie moves into an extended reflection on his relationship to death and fatalism.
In the present thread, we follow his recovery through Griffiths’ tenderly diaristic documentation, which includes, at one point, a call from family friend Wes Anderson. Meanwhile Gibney employs archival news footage and old on-camera interviews with Rushdie to take us back to his identity-crisis-riddled early years between India and his adopted home of London, and the emotional abuse he suffered while living with his alcoholic father. But for the most part, Gibney keeps to the events after 1988, when Rushdie’s Islam-inspired magical realist tome became the flashpoint for a fiery debate over free speech and creative freedom.
Excerpts from the novel are accompanied by scratchy animated renderings of the story — about two Indian-Muslim men living in London who undergo spiritual upheavals after surviving a plane crash — that echo Rushdie’s existential musings and emphasize the work as a product of his imagination. It’s a way of highlighting the absurdity of the violent response from orthodox Muslim communities — all this rage for a story? — and more generally, the dangers that religious extremism poses to civil society. When Ayatollah Khomeini called for Rushdie’s righteous assassination in 1989, protests and book burnings broke out in the U.K., Pakistan and India; elsewhere, bookstores were destroyed, editorial offices torched, and Rushdie’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Agarashi, was murdered.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
