One year before he died at the age of 90, art critic and author John Berger was the subject of this musingly celebratory quartet of documentary essay-portraits, now on UK release – almost the cinematic equivalent of a festschrift.
Its writers, directors and contributors feature Berger’s circle of friends, prominent among them the writer and producer Colin MacCabe and the actor Tilda Swinton. Intimate interviews and conversations are interspersed with clips of Berger in his handsome prime, the dazzling broadcaster and creator of the television series and critical work Ways of Seeing; MacCabe contrives some Godardian flourishes.
This film is refreshingly serious and pays due tribute to an important public intellectual, ruminating on his experience as the child of a soldier, on the nature of what Berger called the “loneliness of man as a species” and from a political view, the continuous necessity of challenging the gradual corporate acquisition of power and the destruction of democratic accountability.
His 1972 Booker-winning novel G is not much touched on, other than to note again Berger’s donation of half his prize money to the Black Panthers. It is an intelligent and focused tribute, though sometimes verging on the precious. The film comes alive most fully when Berger hilariously gives Swinton’s teenage daughter a lesson in riding a motorbike and we watch them roaring indomitably off into the distance.
