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Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times

Despite director, Chomsky has say

By Janice Page, Globe Correspondent
Boston Globe
Published: 01/31/2003

Teddy Roosevelt gets all the credit for making the saying famous, but it's Noam Chomsky who surely owns the American record for length of service to the age-old proverb ''speak softly and carry a big stick.'' Chomsky's first article, about the spread of fascism in Europe, was penned at age 10. Now 74, the activist and MIT linguistics professor is still out there lecturing, debating, and signing endless autographs in support of leftist writings that matter-of-factly seek to influence public opinion and policy makers around the world. As the uninitiated will learn in ''Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times,'' Chomsky's manner is relaxed and tutorial, even when he's unleashing his most pointed critiques of US foreign policy in the wake of Sept. 11. This makes for a visually deadly documentary -- unhelped by director John Junkerman, whose greatest creative inspiration is the use of audio-equipped blackouts between interview and lecture segments -- but if you're a fan of what the professor has to say, there's some satisfaction in watching him say it on film.

Chomsky comes armed with an encyclopedic grasp of the disenfranchised histories that few encyclopedias track. Coupled with powers of deductive reasoning and communication that must have driven his parents crazy at bedtime, his views are food for considerable thought, even among his critics.

Still, ''Power and Terror'' would have benefited from putting a wider lens on the man and his detractors, as seen in 1992's superior ''Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media'' by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. Junkerman's one-dimensional view, by contrast, limits Chomsky's powers to shooting imperialist fish in a barrel.