John Berger

John Berger

Born: November 5, 1926
Died: January 2, 2017
in Stoke Newington, London, England
John Peter Berger (/ˈbɜːrdʒər/; 5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name, is often used as a university text. He lived in France for over fifty years.

Movies for John Berger...

8 Poems of Emigration
Title: 8 Poems of Emigration
Character: Poet / Narrator (voice)
Released: June 14, 2020
Type: Movie
"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.
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The Economy of the Dead
Title: The Economy of the Dead
Character: Speaker (voice)
Released: December 9, 2017
Type: Movie
Short super-8 film capturing the changes taking place in Soho and questioned by John Berger's essay on twelve theses on the economy of the dead.
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The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
Title: The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
Character: Self
Released: June 23, 2017
Type: Movie
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
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The New Man
Title: The New Man
Character: Self
Released: November 18, 2016
Type: Movie
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.
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John Berger or The Art of Looking
Title: John Berger or The Art of Looking
Character: Self - Subject
Released: June 11, 2016
Type: Movie
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.
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Taşkafa, Stories of the Street
Title: Taşkafa, Stories of the Street
Character: Narrator
Released: October 15, 2013
Type: Movie
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.
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12.Août.2002
Title: 12.Août.2002
Character: Self (Voice)
Released: April 23, 2012
Type: Movie
12 August 2002 is the date which was printed on every shot in this film by the memory of the camera. On that day a huge tower which disrupted the north wing of an abandoned castle was torn down, floor by floor. The film is a record of the methodical disruption of this building by inhuman and all-powerful machines. The voice-over consists of a phone call by the author John Berger (1926), who has written numerous and radical opinion pieces in favour of the people of Palestine.
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Walter, retour en résistance
Title: Walter, retour en résistance
Character: Himself
Released: November 4, 2009
Type: Movie
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Letter from Gaza
Title: Letter from Gaza
Released: May 7, 2008
Type: Movie
Address to the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature
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Art, Poetry and Particle Physics
Title: Art, Poetry and Particle Physics
Released: February 10, 2004
Type: Movie
John Berger is one of our most celebrated and respected writers and broadcasters. A former winner of the Booker Prize, he also wrote one of the most influential books on art of our time, Ways of Seeing, which became a landmark documentary series on BBC Television. In Ken McMullen's engaging and accessible film, Art, Poetry and Particle Physics, he travels to the world's biggest particle physics laboratory at CERN in Geneva. The film charts an extraordinary and wide-ranging series of discussions and collaborations between Berger and the leading theoretical and experimental physicists John March Russell and Michael Doser.
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The Spectre of Hope
Title: The Spectre of Hope
Character: Himself
Released: January 28, 2002
Type: Movie
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.
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Visioni di case che crollano
Title: Visioni di case che crollano
Character: Narrator
Released: January 1, 2002
Type: Movie
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W. Eugene Smith: Photography Made Difficult
Title: W. Eugene Smith: Photography Made Difficult
Character: Self
Released: September 25, 1989
Type: Movie
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.
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Title: Another Way of Telling: Views on Photography
Character: Self
Released: May 7, 1989
Type: TV
Series of four programmes in which writer John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr question the nature and practice of photography. GB. Annalogue, for the BBC. BBC2 tx 07/05/1989 - 28/05/1989
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Play Me Something
Title: Play Me Something
Character: Secretary
Released: February 18, 1989
Type: Movie
A group of individuals are stranded at a small island airport when the flight from the mainland is delayed. At that moment, a stranger appears and begins telling the story of a summer romance in Venice.
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About Time
Title: About Time
Character: John Berger
Released: February 1, 1985
Type: Movie
Film Essay based on “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos” by John Berger.
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Parting Shots from Animals
Title: Parting Shots from Animals
Character: Self (narrator)
Released: January 1, 1980
Type: Movie
“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.
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Pig Earth
Title: Pig Earth
Character: Self
Released: June 21, 1979
Type: Movie
“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.
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Title: Apostrophes
Character: Self
Released: January 10, 1975
Type: TV
Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years (724 episodes) from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television (around 6 million regular viewers). It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2 (which was called "Antenne 2" from 1975 to 1992). The hourlong show was devoted to books, authors and literature. The format varied between one-on-one interviews with a single author and open discussions between four or five authors.
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Right To Work March
Title: Right To Work March
Released: October 19, 1972
Type: Movie
They're young, unemployed and on the march - from Glasgow, Liverpool and Swansea to London.
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Title: Ways of Seeing
Character: Self
Released: January 8, 1972
Type: TV
John Berger's Ways of Seeing changed the way people think about painting and art criticism. This watershed work shows, through word and image, how what we see is always influenced by a whole host of assumptions concerning the nature of beauty, truth, civilization, form, taste, class and gender. Exploring the layers of meaning within oil paintings, photographs and graphic art, Berger argues that when we see, we are not just looking - we are reading the language of images.