John Berger
1926 - 2017The Spectre of Hope
Paul Carlin
John Berger, Sebastião Salgado
The Spectre of Hope is based on the latest work of photographer Sebastiao Salgado. Salgado spent 6 years traveling to over 40 countries, taking pictures of globalization and its consequences - most notably, the mass migrations of populations around the world. In the film, Salgado presents his remarkable photographs in conversation with John Berger.
The Spectre of Hope
John Berger or The Art of Looking
Cordelia Dvorak
John Berger, Selçuk Demirel
Art, politics and motorcycles - on the occasion of his 90th birthday John Berger or the Art of Looking is an intimate portrait of the writer and art critic whose ground-breaking work on seeing has shaped our understanding of the concept for over five decades. The film explores how paintings become narratives and stories turn into images, and rarely does anybody demonstrate this as poignantly as Berger.
John Berger or The Art of Looking
W. Eugene Smith: Photography Made Difficult
Gene Lasko
Peter Riegert, John Berger
The war in the South Pacific, a country doctor in Colorado, victims of industrial pollution in a Japanese village — all were captured in unforgettable photographs by the legendary W. Eugene Smith. This program showcases over 600 of Smith’s stunning photographs and includes a dramatic recreation in which actor Peter Riegert (Crossing Delancey, Local Hero) portrays the artist using dialogue take from Smith’s diaries and letters. Interwoven through the program are archival footage and interviews with family and friends of this brilliant, complicated man, whose work developed from twin themes of common humanity and social responsibility.
W. Eugene Smith: Photography Made Difficult
Taşkafa, Stories of the Street
Andrea Luka Zimmerman
John Berger
Taşkafa is a real dog and also a legend on the streets of Istanbul. John Berger begins Taşkafa’s story, reading from his novel, King, the story of the disappearance of a community told from a dog’s perspective. The area’s ordinary people – taxi drivers, shopkeepers, street traders – care deeply about the welfare of the city’s street dogs and they tell us stories about Taşkafa and their other canine neighbours. The animals are a symbol of community living, where people (and dogs) look out for each other, but this is a community in transition; one from which dogs are starting to be expelled. Eccentric, amusing and very warm, the film is a powerful indictment of the impact of global politics and the economic appropriation of public space but, even more, it is a tribute to both the spirit of resistance and to city life that can accommodate people and dogs together.
Taşkafa, Stories of the Street
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
Colin MacCabe, Tilda Swinton
John Berger, Tilda Swinton
The Ways of Seeing writer is celebrated by Tilda Swinton and her fellow admirers in an unorthodox four-part documentary that visits him at his Alpine home
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
The New Man
Josh Appignanesi, Devorah Baum
Adam Andrusier, Lisa Appignanesi
A creative documentary about becoming a parent... and how to reconceive yourself. Fiction director Josh Appignanesi turns the camera on himself and his wife as they undergo the ordeal of becoming parents in the era of man-children and assisted reproduction. Faced with fatherhood, Josh spirals comically into an envious career funk. But life-threatening complications emerge- the couple are tested to the brink, confronting shattering losses. It's a portrait of our generation going through a revolution in reproduction- forced to find new ways to think about ourselves as creative beings. We hear from Slavoj Žižek, John Berger, Darian Leader (20,000 Days) and Zadie Smith. Universal yet still taboo, it's a film for everyone who has children, wants them, or still feels like a child themselves.
The New Man
Play Me Something
Timothy Neat
John Berger, Tilda Swinton
A collection of seemingly unrelated individuals wait in a small island airport. Their flight is delayed, and each takes a turn to tell the others a story from his or her life. All small island stories of ordinary, uninspiring lives. Until one man, The Stranger, tells his story of a summer romance in Venice.
Play Me Something
Pig Earth
Mike Dibb
John Berger, Jean Mohr
“Pig Earth” marked John Berger’s first return to television after “Ways of Seeing”. The film, boldly using mostly still photographs, is based on John’s book of the same name, which was both a work of fiction as well as a history of French Peasant experience, as told by John ‘the story teller’, as if in the peasant’s own voices. All of which was given brilliant visual expression in the film through a series of beautifully edited sequences, each constructed from vivid and moving photographs of peasants and their lives, in black and white and colour, by John’s friend and long-time collaborator, the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr.
Pig Earth
Göçün 8 Şiiri
Kurtuluş Özgen
John Berger
"8 Poems of Emigration" is a found footage film that focuses on the migration crisis. The film, while focusing on the immigration and immigration issue caused by the wild global capitalism, consists of the images and the found footage from the recording of the work named "8 Poetry of Immigration" that John Berger read to the audience in 2007 at the Fine Arts Center in Madrid. The narrative of the movie is revealed by the conflict between image and sound order. With the out-of-context (misuse) use of commercial images and music, the film creates a critical structure that opposes capitalism.
8 Poems of Emigration
Parting Shots from Animals
Christopher Rawlence, Mike Dibb
John Berger
“Parting Shots from Animals” was inspired by essays by John Berger and developed in collaboration with Chris Rawlence. Shot entirely in the UK, it consists of a diverse series of arresting ‘films within a film’, each presented as if made about us from the perspective of the animals whose lives we may appear to celebrate, but continue to exploit and to destroy. While John Berger doesn’t appear in the film and wasn’t directly involved in it’s making, he narrates to great effect the text he co-wrote to accompany the film’s provocative opening sequence.
Parting Shots from Animals
Right To Work March
Frances de la Tour, Tony Anscombe
Young Socialists from Glasgow, Liverpool and Swansea march to London and discuss their economic struggles en route. Supporting them are Ken Loach, Corin Redgrave, Arnold Wesker and other leading cultural figures of the left of British politics. The march is intercut with scenes dramatising parallel injustices in the English Civil War era and earlier - featuring Frances de la Tour in queenly mode as Elizabeth I. The film's unconventional structure also features frequent extracts of the rousing pop concert, with the band Slade, which culminated the epic march.
Right To Work March
