Yours in Revolution: Retrofitting Carlos the Jackal

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