The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger

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.    

2015 Top Ten List #4 The Salt of the Earth

Wim Wenders (left) consulting with Sebastião Salgado

 

Juliano Ribeiro Salgado (left), his father Sebastião Salgado, and Wim Wenders

  

THE SALT OF THE EARTH              A-      
France  Brazil  Italy  (110 mi)  2014  d:  Wim Wenders         co-director:  Juliano Ribeiro Salgado

For German director Wim Wenders, it all came down to a photograph that he kept in his office for years, a black and white portrait from the mid 1980’s of a blind woman from Mali conveying a feeling of such profound depth and supreme sadness that it served as a constant reminder of the kind of power and impact that art can have on the human soul.  Shot by Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, this distinctive artistic voice becomes the focus of the film, much like Wenders’ earlier Oscar nominated documentaries BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (1999) and Pina in 3D (2011), where Salgado literally narrates his life story in a film that examines his life and his work.  The project originated with his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, one of the principal cinematographers attempting to make a documentary on the life of his father, eventually bringing in Wenders to offer perspective and help shape his overall vision.  The outcome is a work of maturity and profound significance, where the subtle influence of Wenders in helping to choose the photographs by Salgado that moved him the most adds a surprising depth, basically allowing the pictures to tell the story.  Born in the lush hills of Brazil where the rain forest connects to farmland, Salgado earned a master’s degree in economics and began to work for the International Coffee Organization, often traveling overseas for the World Bank, where it was his wife Lélia that introduced him to a camera, forming a working partnership, as she now edits and produces his work.  Developing an interest in photography while working in Africa in the early 70’s, most notably pictures he took in Niger, Salgado studied photography while living in Paris, initially working on news assignments before developing an interest in photojournalism, specializing in social documentary photography of workers in impoverished third world nations.  One of his first assignments was photographing as many as a hundred thousand mud-covered workers, in lines stretching as far as the eye can see, onto rickety ladders plunging into the depths of deep pits in a mammoth Brazilian gold mine called Serra Pelada in the 1980’s, a bleak metaphor for the brutal history of a Dante Inferno human hell on earth, where the unforgettable images resemble the opening Biblical era slave sequences in Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), showing the backbreaking efforts of workers slaving under the hot sun pressed in such close proximity to one another that they resemble ants in an anthill carrying packs of dirt on their backs, climbing up and down the precarious wooden ladders all day.  Because of the use of mercury in the gold extraction, the area is now contaminated and the mines abandoned, leaving a giant open pit filled with polluted water. 

Working on long-term, self-assigned projects that are eventually published as books, Salgado has witnessed some of the most extreme horrors of human experience—war, poverty, greed, famine, genocide, and disasters.  The film is largely a series of photographs shown in what is essentially a slide show narrated by Salgado speaking about the circumstances under which they were taken, reliving a certain autobiographical period of his life, like a film within a film, where the viewer gets the impression Wenders is examining a fellow documentarian reflecting upon his own work.  While there are lovely, poetic touches throughout, the film is a painstakingly meticulous Robert Flaherty style documentation of the bleakness of the human condition as seen through photographs that couldn’t be more sorrowful and mesmerizing, and while the voiceover narration provides perspective, it hardly matches the power of the images.  In the decades of the 80’s and 90’s, Salgado immersed himself into the middle of some of the most brutally terrible and disastrous events of our age, genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, relentless wars, famine, the pitiful human existence in overrun and medically plagued refugee camps, and large-scale environmental disasters like the burning of the oil fields in Kuwait.  Perhaps based on his economic background, he concentrates on how it is always the poor who are the most vulnerable and the worst effected, showing how easily the privileged class remains aloof and a safe distance removed from these catastrophes, where the weakness and ineffectiveness of the world’s response is equally calamitous, as people continue to go about their lives completely unaffected.  While Salgado and Wenders are obviously personally driven, self-motivated, and wildly passionate about their work, it remains an open question what effect, if any, their work has in influencing the rapidly changing world around them.  The global economy has had a remarkable effect internationally, where land and jobs that were once plentiful have dried up and all but disappeared, leaving behind a blighted stain of toxic pollution and personal horrors.  One can’t help but be dumbfounded by the gut-wrenching experiences Salgado continued to seek out, each one more devastatingly bleak and gruesome than the last, where he witnessed one African genocide after another, watching uncountable numbers of people dying right before his eyes, where despite his deep personal commitment to document these images, one of the few who did, the rest of the world inexplicably preferred to look away.  It’s hard to think of another film that makes such a compelling case for making the most out of one’s life, where one man puts himself on the line repeatedly, risking death and deprivation over an extensive period of time, immersing himself in the most horrible war ravaged regions on earth, using only a camera as his voice. 

While it’s hard to know just what drives the man or inspires his work, by documenting Salgado’s efforts with this degree of intense scrutiny, Wenders is immortalizing the power of his art, elevating his own artistic relevance in the process, as if making the case before the world of public opinion.  How can one choose to look away?  Perhaps more than presidents or political leaders, Sebastião Salgado has had an amazing influence on his fellow man, as there are few cameras around to witness human atrocities, few have gone through what he voluntarily witnessed and experienced, adding untold emotional layers of depth through the artistry of his pictures.  One assumes there is a moral imperative behind this work, that the camera has the power to offer a voice to the voiceless, that there is an unmitigated force of good behind every image, as each is so carefully composed in such a distinct social setting.  Who are the disadvantaged that still roam the earth?  Largely invisible in reality wherever they go, so far removed from the mainstream, they resemble the dinosaurs we read about in science books, all but eradicated and extinct in our mind’s eyes, where we’ve lost any personal connection to their “living” lives.  When did their lives start to lose meaning?  It was the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and others that brought these exotic images of people in such faraway places to life, where images we could never conjure up in our limited education and collective imaginations suddenly burst into life onscreen, adding depth and extension to our knowledge, perhaps questioning the playfulness of the filmmaker’s methods, but leaving no doubt as to the cultural accuracy of an ethnically different way of life.  Flaherty’s approach, like Salgado, was to live within an existing community, become familiar with their way of life, and understand their story, so to speak, “before” shooting the pictures.  Who knows what drove Salgado to some of the most extreme places on Earth, spending years on each individual project, like visiting a remote Amazon tribe, having a unique ability to befriend total strangers, becoming embedded within the culture depicted in each individual photograph, where decades later he still warmly remembers not just the context of the photo but the individuals he spent time with.  After three decades, Salgado returns to his native Brazil, retiring to his family farm, united with an adult son he barely knew while globetrotting around the planet, where he undergoes a regenerative rebirth of the spirit, transforming the drought-ridden, dried out lands around him through a major restoration project of building a new rainforest ecosystem, replanting specifically indigenous species native to the region, literally creating new plant life that had died and disappeared, a victim of global climate change, calling it his Genesis project, conceived as a potential path to humanity’s rediscovery of itself in nature.  While he may take solace in finding some degree of natural balance, where he can once again walk along the lush grounds, it’s the harrowing images of his life’s work that will remain imprinted in our collective subconscious, where seeing such large masses of war refugees is particularly disturbing, ghostly images of starving children, displaced people trekking across the Sahara, and they are the lucky ones that survived, where Salgado himself was moved to despair, expressing his outrage, “We humans are terrible animals.”  “Everyone should see these images,” he reminds us, “to see how terrible our species is.”  Somber and profoundly meditative, few films leave such a definitive cinematic impact afterwards.