“Visual culture” is one of those terms that sounds more pretentious than it is — the same can perhaps be said for BBC documentaries from 1972. But hear me out: John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is fantastic, it will change how you think about everything, and it is infinitely watchable.
A vintage 16mm print of the film will screen Thursday night as part of Third Man’s Light and Sound Machine series, an ongoing partnership with the Belcourt Theatre. It’s a wonderful opportunity — even those familiar with the ’70s documentary may have only read the book adaptation, which is practically required reading for any college student interested in art history, postmodernism, media studies or contemporary aesthetics. While I realize that using terms like “postmodernism” is probably not the best way to argue against declaring a film pretentious, we need to get these words out of the way up front. Mystification. The male gaze. Works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
The meat of Ways of Seeing, which is what we’re really interested in, is deceptively simple. Seeing things, Berger tells us, is a reciprocal act. There is the painting, the photograph, the computer screen, and then there is the person who is looking at it. Seeing is based on a relationship, and that relationship is worth exploring just as much as the objects being seen.
Divided into four 30-minute segments, Ways of Seeing is to art what Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is to science — that is, it’s a deep well of ideas that appeals to the most cerebral parts of us in a language intended for a general audience. Be prepared to see Berger’s brand of common-sense intellectualism as particularly refreshing in the Trump era, when image, however poorly constructed, is used to exploit and manipulate. It’s as if Berger has time-traveled from 1972, floppy haircut and polyester shirt in tow, to tell us about our present, and the difference between art and propaganda. “In the end,” he says, “the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.”
