John Berger: ‘If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen’

theguardian.com

96 points·prismatic··9 comments

"Ways of Seeing" was also made into a short BBC television series.

A few years ago, Lorna Mills gathered a number of contemporary artists and remade the series as "Ways of Something", with each artist contributing a minute of material to accompany the audio by John Berger

https://vimeo.com/105731173

If you haven't read "Ways of Seeing", I heartily recommend it. Without spoiling too much, I'll say that it opened my eyes to a whole layer of interesting ideas, and changed how I look at art and images in general. It's very philosophical, but not overbearing.

How does it compare with the series? I'm not familiar with either, and curious whether one is clearly preferable to the other as an introduction to the ideas both appear to cover.

Sadly I wouldn't know - But if the content is mostly the same, I assume the visual component is great: my one gripe was that I kept having to google high-res images of the paintings mentioned, because the ones in the book were tiny and unhelpful.

It's all on YouTube. Contrary to what another commenter implied, the TV series preceded the book.

Personally I think it's all a bit of an ego trip for Berger.

Either or, or both. The book is short.

No doubt. But, with no electronic edition available, it represents a larger investment of time and effort than otherwise; I can much more easily watch videos on the train than schlep a paper book along.

He wrote the screenplays of some great films in the 70s directed by Alain Tanner. Most are generally hatrd to find now, they were very good. esp Middle of the World.

Middle of the World is one of my favorite films ever. I kind of dread finding it again for fear that it won't seem as great as I remember.

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