Salman Rushdie narrates his own attempted murder in Alex Gibney’s Knife, now in UK cinemas

In his memoir Knife, Salman Rushdie never grants his attacker a name. He calls him “the A.” and, in a chapter with that title, invents a conversation with him: a novelist’s answer to violence, which is that if the man will not explain himself, you make him up. Alex Gibney’s documentary Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, now in UK and Irish cinemas, has to decide what to do with that device on screen, and its answer says much about who gets to be the author of this story.

Gibney has made his name investigating institutions that would rather not be investigated, from the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Going Clear. This time the subject had already written his own testimony, so the job is closer to adaptation than to exposure. The film is built from three materials: Rushdie reading his book as narration, the video diaries kept at the hospital bedside by his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and an archive of the decades in which one novel turned its author into a headline.

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In a documentary, casting is the choice of who speaks, and Gibney hands the voice almost entirely to the man who was nearly silenced. IndieWire’s Kate Erbland described the effect plainly: “there is an immediate impact from hearing a man narrate his own attempted murder, and with such a calm (and often darkly humorous) demeanor.” Griffiths is the second author. Sight and Sound notes that she is credited as the film’s cinematographer, and her footage from the days and weeks after the attack is material no reader of the book ever had. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw warns of “stomach-turningly explicit shots of Rushdie’s damaged eye.” The memoir gave the event in sentences. The film presents it as evidence.

Rushdie has said where that record began. “We need to document this, that was perhaps my first coherent thought,” he recalls in the film, as quoted by Sight and Sound. “We want to make a record, because it’s not just about me. It’s about freedom.” The memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, was the first version of that record, and the documentary is a second edition with different tools. Gibney set out his own reading of the source when Abramorama acquired the film for North America, calling the deeper journey “the movement from a place of active hate to a place of love.”

The middle of the film is literary history told as a thriller. Reviews describe Gibney following Rushdie from a Bombay childhood through advertising and Midnight’s Children to The Satanic Verses and the fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Sight and Sound lists what the archive recalls: riots, firebombed bookshops, an attack on the novel’s Italian translator and the killing of its Japanese one. It also keeps the record of who did not stand with him, naming John Berger, Germaine Greer, Roald Dahl and Jimmy Carter among his prominent critics, alongside a clip of Cat Stevens calling Rushdie “irresponsible with his freedom of speech.”

The hardest passage to adapt is the one that made the book a book. Rushdie told the Park Record at Sundance that Gibney found “a wonderful way” into the imagined dialogue: in the film’s version, the A. “doesn’t get to speak. He just has subtitles.” In the memoir, as The New Republic observed, Rushdie had handed his would-be killer some of the best lines; on screen the man is reduced to text, which is the most literary decision in the film and also its most guarded. Sight and Sound calls the sequence “flat and truncated”, while Time Out reports that the recreated exchange behind bars is cut against Kurosawa’s High and Low, a homage it calls well-intentioned but strange. Gibney is surer quoting cinema itself, from Un chien andalou to Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, films Rushdie recalls dreaming of after the attack on his eye.

What the film does not resolve is the question its title raises. Time Out, which gave it three stars, says Gibney “shows little interest in understanding the psyche” of Hadi Matar, the man convicted of the attack, and finds the present-day material sliding into “near-hagiographic framing.” The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney thought it “a fraction overlong.” Bradshaw notes that the film does not mention that Rushdie claimed in 1990 to have embraced Islam, a statement he later retracted. The legal story has also moved on since the Sundance premiere. Matar is serving a 25-year sentence for attempted murder, and this July a federal jury convicted him on terrorism charges, including attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah. A film narrated by its subject can decline to give the attacker a voice. It cannot then claim to have explained him, and this one does not try.

Rushdie’s own reading of the film turns on the attacker’s ignorance rather than his ideology. “The attacker, by his own admission had never read anything I wrote and yet was prepared to commit an act of radical violence,” he told Deadline at Sundance, calling the documentary “a portrait of mindless violence.” According to Sight and Sound, Gibney opens with a recreation of Rushdie’s perspective during the struggle and ends with what the Chautauqua Institution’s cameras recorded that day, intercut with the writer’s return to the same building a year later to stand on the spot where he nearly died. The director told Deadline the last word belongs to comedy: at the end of the credits, Rushdie is served a cake and asks, “Anybody got a knife?”

Gibney produced the film with Erin Edeiken and Sruthi Pinnamaneni for Jigsaw Productions, with Griffiths, Wendy Schmidt and Richard Perello among the executive producers. Andy Grieve edited it and Will Bates composed the score. It runs 107 minutes and carries a 15 certificate in the UK. After its Sundance premiere it travelled to CPH:DOX, Guadalajara, Melbourne and South Korea’s DMZ International Documentary Film Festival.

Altitude opened Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie in UK and Irish cinemas on October 2, after preview screenings on September 30 that came with a recorded Q&A featuring Gibney, Rushdie and Griffiths. In North America, Abramorama launched it at New York’s IFC Center on September 17 ahead of a wider theatrical rollout, and the film is expected to be submitted for Oscar consideration. The book ended with its author alive and writing again. The film ends with him asking for a knife to cut a cake, the one revision only the screen version could make.

Tags: documentary, Alex Gibney, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Salman Rushdie

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