Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie

Max Bolen

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Matt Neglia3.0

KNIFE: THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF SALMAN RUSHDIE takes us through the man’s life, career, assassination attempt and eventual recovery through a largely conventional but intimate approach, revealing both the ugliness and the beauty of humanity along the way. Rushdie’s reflections on his survival are powerful, moving, and genuinely inspiring. Unfortunately, Alex Gibney’s filmmaking rarely rises to meet that level of emotional and intellectual depth. Still worth watching for its subject.

SiddhantAdlakha4.0

From Sundance 2026On August 12, 2022, Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed 15 times while on stage for a speaking event in Chautauqua, New York. The attack, which drew widespread publicity, was undoubtedly traumatic, both physically and psychologically. But it also completed a metaphysical transformation, one set into motion more than 30 years prior. In 1989, Rushdie’s work of Quranically inspired magical realism, The Satanic Verses, made him the target of a fatwa on blasphemous grounds. From that point on, he began to be associated the world over with personal freedom, and with the terrors facing outspoken artists who dared to criticize religion, or fundamentalism. On August 12, the knife that stabbed him, and the person wielding it, not only stole his right eye and his sense of security, but finally transformed him into a martyr. Once and for all, it made him a symbol. Alex Gibney’s documentary Knife: The Attempted Murder Of Salman Rushdie, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, rehumanizes him.Knife captures Rushdie in a manner that feels complete and all-encompassing, deconstructing him in his most vulnerable of moments, when he’s already been butchered. Laid up in a hospital bed in Pennsylvania in the days following the attack, Rushdie and his wife, the poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, record his injuries and lengthy recovery on their brand-new video camera. “We have to document this,” they agree, leading to the treasure-trove of intimate footage that forms the basis of Gibney’s movie. Although the film is technically based on Rushdie’s autobiographical account, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder—from which Rushdie narrates passages over the soundtrack—it isn’t so much an adaptation as a vital accompaniment from an external point of view, showing us the many things Rushdie could not see, or rather, was prevented from seeing, for his own well-being.The first grisly image to shake the audience is of Rushdie’s right eye, swollen and bloody beyond recognition. Within its opening minutes, Knife wordlessly promises to pull no punches, in its depiction of the cost of fanatical beliefs. For much of the first hour, Rushdie lies immobile and Griffiths records herself expressing doubts and anxieties on both their behalfs, as the author begins losing his carefully-constructed sense of self. Perhaps the one tenet that remains—on which neither of them explicitly comment—is his pride. He seldom confesses to the camera directly, leaving Griffiths to speak for him, and leaving Gibney to fill in the gaps through a torrent of archival footage...Read more at The AV Club: www.avclub.com/knife-the-attempted-murder-of-salman-rushdie-humanizing-documentary