On 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.
At the film’s Park City premiere, Gibney mentioned having toyed with limiting Knife‘s scope to recent events. However, his decision to travel back in time, all the way to Rushdie’s childhood in Mumbai (then Bombay), his emigration to Britain, and his eventual move to New York, connects numerous unseen threads that position the film as one of not only personal tragedy, but personal fortitude. After his life was turned upside down by Ayatollah Khomeini’s edict (effectively turning Rushdie into a political pawn), he had to re-learn to live in relative isolation. And though he would eventually emerge from that shell in New York, the attack would make him question whether he’d been too cavalier by living a semi-public life.
Guilt gnaws at Rushdie in his voiceovers, which—although laced with his wry, Anglo-Indian wit—are usually accompanied by jittery, animated sketches, abstract depictions of the stabbing, and even imagined conversations between Rushdie and his attacker. These tap further into his thoughts on the attack and its greater meaning, as he recalls mentally spiraling during his arduous physical therapy. During this period, the author ends up using various classic films—Hitchcock’s Psycho, Polanski’s Knife In The Water, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and so on—as points of comparison for the violence, its impetus, and its psychological aftermath, though what’s especially telling about these touchstones is what remains unsaid about them. The vast majority of the movies mentioned (whose footage appears in context) are from the late 1950s and early ’60s, a time when a young Rushdie—born in 1947—would have been at his most impressionable.
Through its subtlety of emphasis, Knife not only traces the many audio-visual inspirations that make up the author’s creative outlook, but inadvertently frames them as Rushdie reaching into the past for a sense of comfort, as though he were regressing to recollections of childhood, while laying on what could have been his deathbed. The film and its subject alike reflect on everything that made him, and thus, everything that led to his attack, as though it were fated.
For anyone unfamiliar with Rushdie’s work, the documentary also contextualizes his most pivotal writings within place, time, and global and personal mood. Using old and new recordings alike, it allows Rushdie to lay out each of his catalysts, while expressing his lucid thoughts on the depth of authorial imagination. (Gibney matches these with equally imaginative dissolves to and from Rushdie’s close-ups, creating haunting imagery in the process). Soon into the movie’s chronicle of the Satanic Verses controversy, it becomes clear that Rushdie had never intended to become a political figure, or even write a particularly critical book. Just as much as his life was shaped by his upbringing, it was equally molded by people and events far beyond his control, forcing him to make active and defiant decisions about how to simply live.
Perhaps Knife is hagiographic to a degree; after all, Rushdie and his wife are the primary lens through which this story is seen. But this is a film whose impetus is capturing the love and humanity that were so nearly dashed by a violent radical. Enough biographies will eventually be written with more rankling nuances, but Gibney’s job here is to assist in Rushdie and Griffiths’ act of defiant, redefining autofiction. That Rushdie didn’t die is a stroke of luck. That he lived—which is to say, that he continued to live, and found life again—is the film’s raison d’etre. Although chock-full of violence, its most lasting image is of Griffiths taking Rushdie’s hand, while he’s still bedridden, in order to dance with him.
It is perhaps for this humanistic reason that Knife relegates all footage of the attack—of which it has plenty—to a moment late in the author’s recovery, when he’s finally ready to revisit it. As much as it’s a recollection of a specific event, it’s also retrospective in nature: This is a film that first combines and subsequently separates Rushdie the author, the person, and the cultural emblem, while detailing how these various entities came to be. A knife may have slashed the thin membrane between them, condensing decades of persecution into a blade, attempting to reduce Rushdie to the worst day of his life. But in retelling this story from every conceivable angle, from the years of buildup to the days that followed, Griffiths and Gibney steal the assailant’s power, and place it back in the rightful hands of a man whose greatest weapon is the pen.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.