Jackals
I’ve been watching Oliver Assayas’ 330-minute biopic of Carlos the Jackal for the last few days. The subject of radical Leftism fascinates me (an ostensible leftist) and there has been recent cinematic interest reflected in Soderbergh’s Che, Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, and Spielberg’s Munich (from the Zionist perspective). The radicalism/terrorism of the 1960s and 70s political groups is good fodder for shallow, propulsive cinema; most of these films are robustly entertaining and politically depthless. Soderbergh and Assayas aim for realism, framing the “revolutionary” struggle of their protagonists through minutiae and rhetoric, making them more successful than Edel or Spielberg, who simply use violence and glamorous editing (the protagonists of these films are little more than repellent). What is impressively rendered via thoroughness and accuracy is ironically lacking in historicism, context necessary to render these narratives “important” rather than a curiously exciting moment in international affairs, showing how our concerns reside more with the personal than the political, the spectacle more than the society.
