It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
JOHN BERGERIt is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
JOHN BERGERAll photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
JOHN BERGERThis is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
JOHN BERGERIt is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
JOHN BERGERWhat do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.
JOHN BERGERDeep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
JOHN BERGERThe happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.
JOHN BERGERPost-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
JOHN BERGERMen look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
JOHN BERGERFor me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
JOHN BERGERWe can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
JOHN BERGERAll publicity works upon anxiety.
JOHN BERGERIf the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGERSeeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGERLandscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
JOHN BERGERThe envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGER