Near the beginning of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, filmmaker Michel Gondry admits to his interview subject, Noam Chomsky, that he’s a little nervous. Sitting down with Chomsky, who wouldn’t be? Decades before his penetrating critiques of U.S. foreign policy made him a left-wing culture hero, Chomsky revolutionized the field of linguistics with his book Syntactic Structures (1957), which proposed that syntax—the ordering of words in a sentence—was the most important element in written or verbal communication, even more important than the words themselves. Since then he’s published more than a hundred books, accepted more than three dozen honorary degrees, and contributed commentary to scores of political documentaries. By any measure, Chomsky—who turns 85 on Saturday—is one of the most influential thinkers in the world.
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Gondry is no match for him intellectually, and in their two conversations, shot with an old Bolex camera at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April and October 2010, Chomsky responds to the filmmaker’s innocent questions with a master class in philosophy and cognitive science. Yet Gondry, known for such whimsical fantasies as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Science of Sleep (2006), and Be Kind Rewind (2008), contributes a powerful visual response by pairing their audio track with wildly imaginative animation sequences that illustrate and sometimes reflect on Chomsky’s ideas. Aside from a few frames within the frame that show the professor speaking to Gondry in a conference room, the entire film is 2-D animation, ranging from free-spirited doodles to more elaborate geographic drawings that help explain Chomsky’s concepts. The end result is a striking inquiry into how we comprehend the world, neatly divided between a man of words and a man of images.
As a filmmaker—and one who got his start in the surreal, fast-moving medium of music video—Gondry understands that this sense of psychic continuity is the very thing that enables him to edit images together and create a single reality for the viewer. His live-action movies often leap back and forth from present to past, from dreams to waking life, from the conscious to the subconscious, so forcefully that after a while the two states begin to seem equivalent. Chomsky floors him with the Ship of Theseus paradox: In Greek mythology, after Theseus returns home from war the planks of his battleship are replaced one by one until the entire thing has been rebuilt. As Thomas Hobbes asked, what then constitutes the original ship—the pile of old planks or the new planks assembled into the ship’s form? Chomsky and Gondry debate the matter at length, but eventually Chomsky persuades him that our image of a ship or a tree or any other object is completely mental and has no relation to anything in the physical world.
Directed by Michel Gondry 89 min. Gene Siskel Film Center 164 N. State 312-846-2800 $11siskelfilmcenter.org
