THE SEASONS IN QUINCY:
FOUR PORTRAITS OF JOHN BERGER B+
Great Britian (90
mi) 2016
d: Tilda Swinton co-directors: Colin MacCabe, Bartek Dziadosz, and
Christopher Ross Official
Site
It seems now that I
was so near to that war.
I was born eight years
after it ended
When the General
Strike had been defeated.
Yet I was born by Very
Light and shrapnel
On duck boards
Among limbs without
bodies.
I was born of the look
of the dead
Swaddled in mustard
gas
And fed in a dugout.
I was the groundless
hope of survival
With mud between
finger and thumb
Born near Abbeville.
I lived the first year
of my life
Between the leaves of
a pocket bible
Stuffed in a khaki
haversack.
I lived the second
year of my life
With three photos of a
woman
Kept in a standard
issue army paybook.
In the third year of
my life
At 11am on November
11th 1918
I became all that was
conceivable.
Before I could see
Before I could cry out
Before I could go
hungry
I was the world fit
for heroes to live in.
Self-Portrait,
1914-18, by John Berger, 1970, read out loud in the film by Tilda Swinton, Self-portrait 1914-18
Tilda Swinton’s intelligence and artistic sensibility comes center
stage in this film, an unorthodox and thoroughly unconventional documentary
examining in four segments (representing the four seasons) by four different
directors the extraordinary life of John Berger, now almost 90, a revolutionary
Marxist writer and British artist who is perhaps best known in his role as an
art critic. Much like Americans grew up
watching and listening to New York Philharmonic director Leonard Bernstein on
television in the late 50’s in a series of children’s programs describing the
joys of music, Leonard
Bernstein: Young People's Concerts | What Does Music .. YouTube (14:59), John
Berger’s four-part 1972 BBC series “Ways of Seeing” changed the way many in
Britain viewed art and culture, John Berger / Ways of Seeing,
Episode 1 (1972) - YouTube (30:04), with Berger breaking down barriers and
making art seem less coldly imposing and elite, while making it more understandable
and accessible in an everyday real world where it’s simply a part of our lives.
Both projects happened during
television’s infancy at a time when there were just a handful of stations, yet
because there were so few other similarly challenging programs, these programs
tend to be fondly remembered today with reverence, as if they helped shape who
we are today. In a strange way, Swinton
again uses Berger in a primer course for adults in helping to explore our own
humanity by sharing personal moments with him.
It’s a fascinating humanistic gesture born out of twenty years of
friendship with the man, both born on identical days more than thirty years
apart, November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day, each one children of soldiers that fought
in world wars but never uttered a word about their experiences with their
children, now parents of their own, where both maintain a fiercely
individualistic relationship with art.
In the opening segment filmed a week before Christmas in 2010 entitled
“Ways of Seeing,” Swinton visits Berger in his remote winter home in Quincy, a
small mountainous village in the Rhône-Alpes region in France near the Swiss
border where he’s been running a farm since the early 70’s with his American
wife Beverly. In the 70’s, Berger
collaborated with Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner as the screenwriter on several
films, including LA SALAMANDRE (1971), THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD (1974), and
JONAH WHO WILL BE 25 IN THE YEAR 2000 (1976).
We see both as old friends, having known each other since
the 80’s when Swinton began her acting career working in Derek Jarman films,
both working on a radical fringe, viewing one another as common allies in a
free-spirited quest for independence, free of all political boundaries, both
preferring the feel of natural soil beneath their feet, with Swinton living in the
semi-wilderness Highland region in the north of Scotland, where she doesn’t
even own a television, but instead takes pride in cooking with the vegetables
that she grows, using eggs from her own prized hens. In fact, she offers eggs as a personal gift,
swearing they are the best tasting anywhere in the world. Though she was born in London, with a family
that can trace their lineage back to the 9th century, she identifies more with
the Scots, claiming they are intrinsically wired for the hills and the
sea. Like so many others in her
generation, she was influenced by Berger’s “Ways of Listening,” viewing him affectionately
as an old teacher or professor, someone who profoundly inspires others not only
to view art differently, but discover their own innate humanism. When she so eloquently reads his Self-Portrait poem, she not only
identifies with a military father (Berger’s father served as an officer in the
trenches for four years in WWI while Swinton’s father is a decorated general
who lost a leg in WWII) and this spirit of a renewed and rescued generation
that was historically fought for in both world wars, but transforms the viewers
in the process, as it’s a chilling, yet intensely personalized experience. As they view drawings and paintings, they
also listen intently and converse while Swinton slices and cuts apples in a
similar manner to one of Berger’s childhood recollections, with both continuing
to reflect a sense of challenge in the world around them. In the next segment “Spring,” the only one
where Berger is not present, the cows are released from their winter barns to
roam the hillsides, which feels like such a natural part of farming life and
the changing seasons, yet we also discover Berger’s wife Beverly has passed
away, where we sense her absence even before we hear about it, with the entire
segment becoming a poetic meditation on awareness and death. It was Berger’s earlier book, A Seventh Man: Migrant Farmers in Europe
(1975) that led to an interest in the places migrant workers were leaving
behind, which were isolated rural communities.
Instead of going to college, Berger decided to live with a few of these
lone, individual peasant farmers, seeking guidance as if they were scholars or
monks, where instead of investigative books and study, these men spent long
hours in the fields all day performing back-breaking work, so Berger worked
side-by-side with them, learning the tools of the trade of men living in
harmony with nature, which eventually led him to a humble village life in
Quincy.
But it was never that at all. It was more to do with finishing A Seventh Man, and suddenly realising I
didn’t know enough about the people I was writing about, about the actual
experience of what you might call poor village life. In fact, the kind of conditions of which I was
ignorant were the kind of conditions the majority of the people were living in.
Still are, in fact. And those conditions have worsened
considerably. Reading does not really
help you understand those conditions, or find out how these people live. One has to experience it first hand.
In the third segment “A Song for Politics,” director Colin
MacCabe, a British film producer and literary critic who now edits the academic
journal Critical Quarterly, convenes a leftist roundtable
discussion that includes Berger, MacCabe, American poet Ben Lerner, Indian poet
and social activist Akshi Singh, and German filmmaker Christopher Roth, shot in
black & white, where what we see might be conjured up from the past, yet
Berger offers his own assessment, “If one imagines trying to describe some of
the things happening in the world today, now, it seems to me that, mostly,
prose is inadequate, because the vocabulary of prose has become so discredited.
It is inadequate for describing what
people are living across the world today.”
Instead, he suggests what’s missing are revolutionary songs, pulling out
a flask before passing it around, where one imagines he could easily summon up
various stages of his youth in protest, where instead we see images of
resistance from Bella
Ciao! - YouTube (3:16) and The Communist Internationale
(Original, with English Lyrics) - Yo (1:56). It should not be forgotten that Berger’s
“Ways of Seeing” was considered controversial at the time, once flamboyantly
described as “Mao’s Little Red Book for a generation of art students.” Berger also suggests solidarity is not needed
in heaven, but only in hell, a thought that gives the panel pause. Like his friend and collaborator,
photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, who depicts in photographs the most
calamitous human conditions, as seen in Wim Wenders’ 2015
Top Ten List #4 The Salt of the Earth, Berger chronicles the lives of those
who would otherwise go unnoticed throughout history. As Ben Lerner conveys at one point, “While
there is an unwavering commitment to a recognition of the hell that surrounds us…there
is also openness, and attention to the sensual world that doesn’t go away…there
is a total commitment to being alive, to the possibilities of the moment.” Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his
experimental novel G, but then outraged
established circles when he gave half the prize money to the London Black
Panthers, using his acceptance speech to berate one of the award sponsors,
Booker McConnell, blaming his family’s 130 year history of sugar cane production
in the Caribbean as one of the major factors for the region remaining mired in
poverty, John Berger on
the Booker Prize (1972) - YouTube (1:16), claiming “The modern poverty of
the Caribbean is the direct result of this and similar exploitation.” The final episode, “Harvest,” bookends the
first, as Swinton returns to Quincy with her twin children, Xavier and Honor,
as they pay a visit to John’s son Yves, who lives and works on the farm, yet
also paints. Like a reflection of the opening
segment, this segment mirrors the first, yet is seen largely through the
optimistic eyes of the children.
Collecting raspberries from nearby vines, in a moment of grace they pay
tribute to Berger’s wife Beverly by eating them with an accompanying photo of
her nearby, where the living instinctively commune with the dead, though
perhaps the most dramatic moment comes when Berger teaches Swinton’s obviously
thrilled teenage daughter the joy of riding a motorbike. With a modernized, new age soundtrack by
Simon Fisher Turner interspersed throughout, the film is a contemplative,
visually rich mosaic of a beautiful mind, an intellectual that never went to
college, a Marxist that believes in God, and a novelist that became an iconic
television star whose radical views on art culturally transported a
nation.
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