Such freedoms allowed Berger and Dibb to turn what could have been a dull undergraduate lecture into captivating television.
John berger ways of seeing ep 1 series#
“I am struck by how radical and innovative the series still looks.” Dyer contends that modern art documentaries don’t hold a candle to the inventiveness of Berger and the series’ director, Mike Dibb, largely because they don’t enjoy the same level of creative license. “John was a new kind of presenter,” says novelist Geoff Dyer, whose own career began with a book entitled Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger.
In each episode, Berger, who died Monday at 90 in his home in a Paris suburb, generously demystified Renaissance art for the masses without ever condescending. Rather than pious adulation for the work of the masters, he asked us to look closer at the paintings of the time and to question what it was, exactly, that they were celebrating. Ways of Seeing, a four-episode art documentary that aired on BBC Two, ruthlessly questioned the ideologies behind artistic images.
His act of faux vandalism, which aired on British television, came with a voice-over warning that viewers would have their assumptions about art challenged. The man committing the sacrilege? John Berger, author of three novels - including G., which won that year’s Booker Prize - and a man who would become a much-celebrated polymath: playwright, screenwriter, painter and activist, among other things. One night in 1972, a handsome, middle-aged man took a knife to cut the iconic cherubic face from Venus in Sandro Botticelli’s classical painting celebrating the goddess’ birth.
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