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Yours in Revolution: Retrofitting Carlos the Jackal

Thomas, S.

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Abstract

This paper explores the representation of ‘Carlos the Jackal’, the one-time ‘World’s Most Wanted Man’ and ‘International Face of Terror’ – primarily in cin-ema but also encompassing other forms of popular culture and aspects of Cold War policy-making. At the centre of the analysis is Olivier Assayas’s Carlos (2010), a transnational, five and a half hour film (first screened as a TV mini-series) about the life and times of the infamous militant. Concentrating on the var-ious ways in which Assayas expresses a critical preoccupation with names and faces through complex formal composition, the project examines the play of ab-straction and embodiment that emerges from the narrativisation of terrorist vio-lence. Lastly, it seeks to engage with the hidden implications of Carlos in terms of the intertwined trajectories of formal experimentation and revolutionary politics.

Citation

Thomas, S. (2013). Yours in Revolution: Retrofitting Carlos the Jackal. Culture Unbound, 5, 451-478. https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.135451

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Sep 26, 2013
Deposit Date Feb 9, 2012
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Culture Unbound
Publisher Linköpings University Electronic Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 5
Pages 451-478
DOI https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.135451
Keywords Terrorism, Carlos the Jackal, Naming, Faciality, Cold War, Embodiment, Assayas.

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This paper is available under a 'Attribution Non-commercial' Creative Commons license which allows users to distribute the work and to re-work it without the author's permission, but not for any commercial purposes and never without acknowledging the original author.




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