The British novelist, scriptwriter (he worked with the Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner), and art critic John Berger passed away on Monday, January 2, aged 90. He was winner of the 1972 Man Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the English language. In the 1960s, the televised series Ways of Seeing made him a household name. A thinker in the lineage of Walter Benjamin, Berger contributed to the education of the eye of a whole generation.
John Berger always sided with the oppressed, and never separated painting and writing from political engagement. He put his enormous erudition in the service of the examination of themes pertaining to the daily life of ordinary people, such as exile, migrations, and the decline of rural life.
In 2014, thirty years after its release, the publisher L’Écarquillé reissued the French translation of John Berger and Jean Mohr’s book Another Way of Telling (in French, Une autre façon de raconteur) accompanied by a DVD, Play Me Something (in French, Joue-moi quelque chose) by Timothy Neat and John Berger.
The publication contains two complementary works: the reprint of the book, which is both a major essay on photography and a work of fiction (Another Way of Telling, 1981) and a film release, available for the first time in France in DVD format (Play Me Something, 1989). These two pieces are tied together by an essay by Anne Michaels (2013).
The volume combines theoretical reflection and fictional narrative, the true heart of the book (photos by Jean Mohr, story by John Berger and Jean Mohr). This is a literary, poetic attempt at another way of telling a story by means of photomontage.
The film, a 1989 collaboration between John Berger, Jean Mohr, and the filmmaker Timothy Neat, offers a sort of counterpoint. Another way of telling is to ask: “What do photographs mean? How can they be used?”
The book is a patchwork of texts and images, which are suggestive and evocative, rather than imposing any truths. “In this book, we are doing several experiments,” explained John Berger in an interview given to Libération on April 25, 2014. “One of them consists in telling a ‘story without words,’ using only photographs, in order to see what happens with a sequence of images. This story, we suggest, follows an old peasant woman’s reflections on her life. At the beginning, we see her hands knitting; the woman is alone, reminiscing. All this is told through photos taken by Jean Mohr on the many walks we took in Haute-Savoie over the course of seven years.”
Irène Attinger
Irène Attinger is head of the library and bookstore at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.
John Berger and Jean Mohr, Une autre façon de raconter
Published in 2014 by the Éditions L’Écarquillé
€42
