The Sea­sons in Quin­cy: The Four Por­traits of John Berger

How best to cov­er the life and times of one of Britain’s fore­most poet­ic thinkers, John Berg­er, on film? Give him the lin­ear This Is Your Life treat­ment, with fawn­ing endorse­ments from friends and fam­i­ly? Stick to a sin­gle, salient episode and go into minute detail? Or maybe opt for some­thing a lit­tle more kooky and con­cep­tu­al? The Sea­sons in Quin­cy: Four Por­traits of John Berg­er goes for a lit­tle bit of all three routes, offer­ing more reme­di­al mate­r­i­al for Berg­er new­bies and a some deep-dive stuff for the superfans.

Berg­er was cat­a­pult­ed to intel­lec­tu­al infamy with his now-clas­sic TV ser­i­al, Ways of See­ing, based on his own book, in which he offered a bull­shit-free analy­sis of how we could and should read images and glean infor­ma­tion from art. This film offers some thoughts on how Berger’s ways of see­ing have devel­oped in the inter­ven­ing years, how he applies his work to life and how his ideas inter­face with the polit­i­cal real­i­ties of the world.

This film is split into four sep­a­rate seg­ments, each deal­ing with Berger’s life and work from a slight­ly dif­fer­ent van­tage. The first sees old pal Til­da Swin­ton rock up to his lit­tle farm­house in the remote Alpine region of Giffre and the cam­era watch­es as the pair wax philo­soph­i­cal while slic­ing up fruit. It sets the pair up as close friends, but the impres­sion is that she is an acolyte and he is hap­py to engage. He seems unin­ter­est­ed in her day job. And yet, it’s per­haps Swinton’s hunger for knowl­edge, for poet­ry, for ways of express­ing her desires that leave the strongest impres­sion here.

Next the focus shifts to human/​animal rela­tions as a way of express­ing the essen­tial lone­li­ness of exis­tence, and then a pan­el dis­cus­sion on rep­re­sen­ta­tions of war. To close things out, there’s more fruit based antics, as Berg­er sends Swin­tons kids off to pick rasp­ber­ries and hang out with his own son. This final sec­tion, direct­ed by Swin­ton, is a high­light, focus­ing more on inter­per­son­al tri­fles and dialling back the hard philo­soph­i­cal con­tem­pla­tions. See­ing Berg­er con­verse with Swinton’s kids is a high­light, as he active­ly tries to con­nect his com­plex world­view to the soft banal­i­ties of every­day life. The pur­suit of free­dom at any price is encap­su­lat­ed in a sweet post-cred­it sting.

It’s a scruffy work which feels like its been hashed togeth­er by hook or by crook. Swinton’s cli­mac­tic sec­tion is the only bit that comes across as a real film in which a direc­tor reacts to the land­scapes and sub­jects with the cam­era. The open­ing seg­ment tries this, but ends up being ram­bling and inco­her­ent – prob­a­bly a state many a philoso­pher has had to pass through to even­tu­al­ly reach the good stuff.