John Berger @ 90

[Serial_Apologist]

Just thought I'd give this 3-hour long marathon on the great man an upwards bump, just in case anybody's tuned in after tonight's Family Prom.

[Jazzrook]

Just thought I'd give this 3-hour long marathon on the great man an upwards bump, just in case anybody's tuned in after tonight's Family Prom.

A wonderful tribute to a truly remarkable man.
Glad I managed to record the whole 3-hour programme on to DVD via Freeview.
Strangely, the BBC gave very little advance publicity to this programme so many may have missed it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08yrm17

JR

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Recently sorted through my old VHS tapes and discovered this 'Face To Face' with John Berger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLwmv-1AZDg

Also, 'About Time'. Can't imagine this on this Channel 4 today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USzGCdoLhjQ

JR

I watched that "About Time" about two months ago (I've just seen your reference). An extraordinary and moving programme from what seems like another country, where people were allowed to develop ideas, however abstract or challenging, and the audience was assumed to be adult and have attention spans more than their goldfish. He was a remarkable guy. EP Thompson was another, who I met at Warwick and at END. Both could produce perfectly spoken sentences around the most complex of ideas.

It was not just another country but a lost world, never to be recovered.

BN.

[Jazzrook]

I remember seeing this gripping discussion with John Berger & Susan Sontag on 'Voices' back in the early days of Channel 4.
Can't imagine Channel 4 showing such a programme today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoHCR8nshe8

JR

[kernelbogey]

I recently read his Pig Earth - a semi-fictionalised account of peasant life in France in the 1970s; based on stories he was told, when he lived there. Highly recommended.

[Conchis]

Berger is just a name to me. His heyday was somewhat before my time.

Like a lot of writers who weren’t chary about describing themselves as ‘socailists’, his work fell out of fashion in the 80s and never crept back into it.

G is the novel with which he won the Booker Prize (and donated all the prize money to a good cause). Is it a good starting point to explore his oeuvre

[Bella Kemp]

Berger is just a name to me. His heyday was somewhat before my time.

Like a lot of writers who weren’t chary about describing themselves as ‘socailists’, his work fell out of fashion in the 80s and never crept back into it.

G is the novel with which he won the Booker Prize (and donated all the prize money to a good cause). Is it a good starting point to explore his oeuvre

I would certainly recommend starting with Ways of Seeing. His socialism now feels a little old-fashioned and of its time, but he was incredibly insightful about how we perceive the world.

[Conchis]

I would certainly recommend starting with Ways of Seeing. His socialism now feels a little old-fashioned and of its time, but he was incredibly insightful about how we perceive the world.

Thanks. Will look into.


I regret the current neglect of David Mercer and Trevor Griffiths (but not of the ‘British Brecht’ John Arden). Griffiths is still alive but may no longer be a socialist. Mercer ceased to believe in socialism as a viable political creed before his death but still maintained an attachement to ‘socialist ideals’.

[Serial_Apologist]

I would certainly recommend starting with Ways of Seeing. His socialism now feels a little old-fashioned and of its time, but he was incredibly insightful about how we perceive the world.

Well that last sentance can only be supported by pointing out the thinking by which Berger brought Marx up to date, demonstrating its enrichability, filtered through more recent political, sociological and linguistic theory, which are all bound together by Marxism.

[muzzer]

Geoff Dyer’s book on him Ways of Telling is worth a read. Agree about Ways of Seeing. The novels are varied and interesting. Read him as part of my degree and didn’t and don’t see eye to eye on his politics but he is well worth a read. Picked up his book on Picasso recently.

[Richard Tarleton]

I would certainly recommend starting with Ways of Seeing. His socialism now feels a little old-fashioned and of its time, but he was incredibly insightful about how we perceive the world.

A great book (I didn't see the TV series). I re-read it recently. It doesn't seem a particularly "socialist" book to me unless referring to his socio-economic deconstruction of images, how they were created and and how we look at them today - which seems to me (as a non-socialist) as spot-on and brilliantly done. I've been involved in debates about landscapes and how we view them (even written a couple of articles on the subject): other writers have talked about how we each bring our unique world view, cultural baggage and senses to bear on things - George Santayana does this in The Sense of Beauty (pub. 1896), referring to about how we compose things in our minds when we look at them, how two people looking at the same thing see, pick out, different things [I paraphrase].