Stockholm Film Festival

Noam Chomsky is an indefatigable activist who keeps challenging the American public and the press. Chomsky, who is a writer, a radical philosopher and Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has written some thirty books and is constantly producing a stream of articles. Chomsky has filled auditoriums at universities ever since he led the opinion against the invasion of Vietnam in the 60's. In this documentary we travel with Chomsky through Canada, Japan, Europe and the US.

COMMENTARY
''Shit happens'', as some of your friends probably say now and then. Noam Chomsky, philosopher, linguist, celebrated and hated social critic, on the other hand, believes that ''shit'' is produced in deed and content to give the impression that it just happened. To give the world a touch of coincidence. He is perfectly right, of course.
In the documentary Manufacturing Consent. Noam Chomsky and the Media, the question of what separates the documentary from fiction is asked. ''It's longer''.
A lot longer, yes. But here a picture of the modern factory is created. A Societystructure Inc., that functions at the speed of a silent film and with a sense of polished officialdom that even makes the handshakes creak as in a parody of old commercials. ''They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness'' is the film's opening quote from Milton, and from then on there is no turning back, in a chronologically indecipherable but efficient style, between Chomsky as a learned fiveyear-old and increasingly eccentric fiftyyear-old. Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar, who made the film, worked for five years and their company is named Necessary Illusions. An irony worth thinking about. It
is not as sophisticated as subtle.
Chomsky focuses on the media's indirect censorship of ''reality'' so efficiently that the most powerful hate him at the same time as one of them, The New York Times, carries the bizarre little device, ''All the news that's fit to print'' on the front page. Year after year. Chomsky is walking around in a cinematic tour of the world and comments in his mild manner that propaganda is for democracy what violence is for dictatorship. He gives lectures on linguistics (a prodigy in that area as well) with Jean Piaget as audience, half-concealed in a low tea cup. He debates with Foucault who pronounces every syllable carefully like in a beginner's course. ''I do not agree with Mr. Chomsky''. He is the modern renaissance man, an artist in the abstract sense, possessed by enlightenment, by an inner mission, occasionally inflexible. His adversaries are fun to watch. Tom Wolfe anticipates the increasingly universal debate on political correctness with several years. ''He is a part of a current fashion at the universities''.
This documentary is a boyhood dream about a boyhood dream. But with sudden lacunae: Rosa Luxemburg!, Chomsky says, anarchy, a new world!
But the world rapidly grows older, civilization is increasingly turning into its own slogan, increasingly resigned in the Pär Rådström way. ''Pieces of Corpses Sold as Souvenirs'' Aftonbladet shrieks. ''The Chomsky World'' gives a lot of examples of the opposite.
The souvenirs of civilization like pieces from a corpse, a salesman in every corner shop. Like in all boyhood dreams the hero dies at the end, but is resurrected - really - in time for the credits that are here, noW, behind our backs.
It is not a conspiracy theory.
Ulrika Milles

Medverkande

Dokumentär

Producent

Mark Achbar, Peter Wintonick, Adam Symansky

Manus

Mark Achbar & Peter Wintonick

Foto

Marc Achbar, Francis Miquet

Musik

Carl Schultz

Talat språk

English

 

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