Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause

I have been a reader of Chomsky for years and own several of his books. I also own a couple of his CDs and have other audio on my computer. My point: Chomsky is by no means a stranger to me.

This familiarity made the video bittersweet. The bitter part was that the vast majority of the information was not new to me and I have heard Chomsky say these things in other places before. So as a learning tool, it was more refresher than anything shocking or ground-breaking.

But this sin't to say it was without value. All the stuff he should have been talking about in 2003, he was. He speaks of Saddam Hussein who was our ally, of media controlled by corporations, by the control of the people being by fear (which is, although he never says it, Machiavellian policy).

But this video was also sad, because it showed how truly old and frail Chomsky has become. Still energetic, but he seems to be demanding more interesting sweaters. And at one point it looks like he's addressing the Sun Room of a nursing home (he's not). He is so old, in fact, his wife has grown to look just like him - I would have assumed she was his sister. But the sad reality for me was that someday not long in the future, this man - the most intelligent man alive - will be dead.

Watch this documentary after watching "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" (1992 documentary)

After watching Manufacturing Consent "Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause" (2003 documentary), is a more up-to-date extension. It includes a few more items that you may not have heard of or only saw through a filter.

His description of the Government and a few others reminds me of a magic show; watch this hand and not the other.

The downside of the documentary is it is a handful of mixed soundbites with a focus problem. Just once it would be nice to see a Chomsky speech where the only interruption may be a heckler or two, instead of a bunch of verbalized editing.

A documentarist, like any filmmaker, must convey a compelling story. Will Pascoe fails utterly in this effort, cobbling together uninspired snippets of Chomsky's wisdom from a visit to McMaster University in Hamilton. The footage is shot amateurishly and in video. Pascoe's only effort at cohering the fragments into a whole is by periodically throwing a vague title on the screen: "9-11," "Activism," "Truth."

Lame.

Compare this with documentaries like "The Corporation" or "The Fog of War" which create a narrative drawing material from interviews, stock footage, and filmed footage. In the end each delivers a poignant and insightful message deftly and intelligently.

The only saving graces of the film are Chomsky's nonchalantly delivered upendings of historical dogma, and the fact that the running time is only 74 minutes.

One of the more interesting passages was Chomsky's recounting of his experience with National Public Radio. He describes the conservative media as more accommodating to dissenting views, while NPR's liberal dogma strait-jackets its interviewees and dramatically limits its permitted messages. Yet another media outlet to be skeptical of.

This documentary is for Noam Chomsky completists only.

Documentaries are the in thing these days it seems and I rented this film just based on the fact I wanted to hear what Noam Chomsky was up to these days given events of the last couple of years and the film did not disappoint. Chomsky's ability to look at a subject like the war in Iraq and explore the various causes and reasons our brave troops are over there is quite powerful. The film actually made me question a lot of what I hear and see on TV. I had no idea how devestating the UN Sanctions were on the actual people of Iraq, while the government was more or less unaffected because of the corruption there. I had no idea that National Public Radio was forced by Washington to cancel Chomsky's appearance on the radio for fear of what he might say and how controversial it would be. Chomsky tells this story in an amusing and insightful way which is what I really appreciated from this film. "Rebel Without A Pause" shows Chomsky as the bright, well-read intellectual we all know him to be, but it also gives us a sense of the charm, wit, and sarcasm that he holds back from the public (I guess because he's always talking about horrible things like war and poverty and globalization). If you want an interesting look "behind the man" this film will give it to you but will also give you tons of Chomsky post-911 so you can read his books or watch this film and get a good synthesis of the last few books he has written. The DVD extras are interesting as well.

There are some poor production values in this documentary, but I'm a Chomsky devotee, so it didn't bother me that much.

Chomsky is dazzling as usual, a man of effortless eloquence. Almost everything he says is interesting, well-researched and well-considered.

Chomsky is very persuasive because he so often bases his arguments on government documents and news reports that are already in the public domain. He analyzes them and displays the blatant fallacies behind them. This is one of the principal reasons why he's deemed a 'dangerous' thinker who isn't welcome in the U.S. mainstream media. He USED to be welcome at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), but that once-great public broadcaster has been looted and neutered over the past 15 years or so.

An annoying feature of the DVD extras was that questions from the audience were barely audible, and in some cases INaudible. What it creates are rather silly scenes: Chomsky staring at the camera for 30 seconds or so, listening to a question DVD viewers cannot hear. Then he responds, and we must wait for another 30 seconds before we can understand what question he is responding to.

Still, it doesn't really matter that much. Chomsky can distill 20 years of reading and analysis into five minutes. His mind is brilliantly ordered, and his memory is prodigious.

Chomsky comes across not as a pedant or a shrill master of dogma, but as a quiet voice of radical reason. He reminds me of everyone's favourite grandfather: a kindly, gentle, soft-spoken man who rarely needs to raise his voice. He just tells you what he knows, what he has learned, and you can use this as ammunition for rebellion against the state, or, conversely, you can do nothing. (This has been one of the criticisms levelled against Chomsky by the so-called 'hard' left: that he doesn't vigorously exhort, he merely explains and quietly tells you to resist. In other words, he's not 'explosive' enough.)

He is still a very impressive and persuasive voice of reason. But he's now 80 years old (born in 1928). How much longer can he keep doing this stuff?