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MANUFACTURING
CONSENT : NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA
6?/10
Canada 1992
: Peter WINTONICK & Mark ACHBAR : 165(-167) mins
(Two sections
with intermission. Part 1 : Thought Control in Democratic Societies
[95 mins]. Part 2 : Activating
Dissent [72 mins])
In Copenhagen
with a couple of hours to kill before dinner, suffering from a cold, and
a hangover, on a damp and dark day in December, I headed for the Film
Institute to catch what I thought was going to be an 85-minute documentary
on Noam Chomsky. 95 minutes later, the caption came up announcing the
end of Part 1. Intermission, then the second half. Looking at my watch,
I realised that, as restaurants in Copenhagen stop serving at 10, it was
a choice between feeding my brain and feeding my stomach. After a very
brief tussle between body parts – with conscience also making its presence
felt on cinema’s behalf - the stomach prevailed.
I’d seen enough
of Manufacturing Consent to know that it wasn’t going to get a
great deal better in the second half – not that the first half was especially
poor. It was just that I was tired of the dichotomy between the strength
of Chomsky’s ideas – which are fascinating and urgent in whatever medium
they’re expressed (I have a split 7” single he did with Bad Religion to
prove that point) – and the often asinine weakness of their presentation,
courtesy of Canadian directors Wintonick and Achbar.
The idea of
editing together many of Chomsky’s appearances on worldwide TV and radio
over 25 years is an excellent one, and the film-makers must be applauded
for the great range of clips they’ve accumulated. But it’s very frustrating
that whenever Chomsky is questioned or taken on, the ‘opposition’ is shown
in very brief clips – especially since these moments, featuring the likes
of Tom Wolfe and William F Buckley, are among the most entertaining in
the whole film.
And why on
earth did they Wintonick and Achbar feel it necessary to ‘improve’ Chomsky’s
delivery with their array of cack-handed tricks and gimmicks. Whenever
anybody says anything especially important, KEY PHRASES are flashed up
on screen in block capitals, and they stay there for a few seconds to
ensure that they’ve SUNK IN. This isn’t the only instance of the directors
doing the opposite of what is Chomsky’s main message here, namely the
importance of everyone thinking for themselves.
Seldom does
Chomsky get to speak more than a couple of sentences, for instance before
we cut to howlingly prosaic stock-footage or stills to show us exactly
what he’s talking about, just in case we couldn’t work it out for ourselves.
The style of the movie is a great shame, because its content is often
dynamite – the East Timor section is powerful, sobering stuff, especially
the to-camera footage recorded by Australian reporter Greg Shackleton
the day before he was killed by the invading Indonesian army. But such
riveting sequences sit very awkwardly the numerous larkish live-action
improvisations, most memorably the “illustration” of how one newspaper
bowdlerised another’s editorial on Timor. This is represented by ‘surgeons’
filleting out column inches on a mock operating-table and, as in often
the case, the directors themselves appear unbilled.
While Wintonick
isn’t quite a camera-hogging Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore figure,
by the end of the first part of Manufacturing Consent, the audience
may well be rather too familiar with his bulky frame and geeky haircut.
The Michael Moore comparison is especially useful with regards to Manufacturing
Consent, as the film shares much ground with Moore’s Bowling
For Columbine. The latter’s razzle-dazzle approach is a million
miles from Chomsky’s brand of forensic analysis, but Moore’s film feels
much less like a case of preaching to the converted – how many non-Chomskyites
are going to sit in an arthouse for three hours watching a movie called
Manufacturing Consent? Or even, in my case, an hour and a half?
23rd
December, 2003
(seen [part one only] 18th December : Cinemateket,
Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark)
by Neil
Young
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