February 16, 2003

Power and terror: Noam Chomsky in our times is a rather grand title for a bare-bones, 74-minute documentary that should have been called What Noam’s thinking now. But because what Chomsky is thinking is always of interest, this brief and reverential film is as well.

Chomsky is one of the United States of America’s most controversial pundits — an iconoclast and provocateur who is often simultaneously praised and damned for his uncompromisingly radical political views. The New York Times, for instance, said he was “arguably the most important intellectual alive, but maddeningly simple-minded.”

Chomsky deserves a more thoughtful documentary than Power and terror, and in fact he got it in 1993’s Manufacturing consent: Noam Chomsky and the media, a two-hour-and-47-minute intellectual epic that took four years to make.

The current film, by contrast, was more of a spur-of-the-moment deal. John Junkerman, an American documentary filmmaker living in Japan, got the idea soon after the attacks on the World Trade Centre to bring Chomsky’s perspectives on Sept 11 to a wider audience in Japan, which is why there’s Japanese rock music on the soundtrack and some of Chomsky’s comments touch on that country.

Power and terror is composed of a single, extended Chomsky interview intercut with scenes of him giving speeches, getting rock-star treatment from adoring audiences as he talks about the aftermath of Sept 11.

Although he deplores the attacks, Chomsky believes they are historic “not because of the scale, but because of who the victims are.” Imperial centres, in his words, have traditionally been immune. Because he considers any violence against civilians to be terrorism, he views the United States as “one of the worst terrorist states in the world” and sees the World Trade Centre attack as more or less a case of the chickens coming home to roost. “We can’t comprehend,” he says bluntly, “applying to ourselves the standards we apply to others.”

Because Chomsky is so lucid and because his point of view is so rarely heard, Power and terror is a stimulating experience as the man lets us know, for instance, that he considers speaking truth to power to be a waste of time because power already knows the truth.

But it’s instructive that the most involving scenes in Power and terror involve Chomsky interacting with post-speech questioners, often gently puncturing the balloons of the more doctrinaire. It’s a situation that points up the film’s main flaw, the absence of other voices.

Although it’s mind-boggling to put Chomsky and producer Robert Evans, the subject of The kid stays in the picture into the same sentence, perhaps the only thing the two have in common is that their films would benefit from having someone else along for the ride. From a cinematic point of view, two sides of an issue are always better than one. —Dawn/The LAT/WP News Service.

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