Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  Compare now the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual return.

  The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown. Twenty takes of the same scene may be shot, but the one that is used will be selected because it has the most convincing look and sound of a First Time.

  Where, then, do these First Times take place? Not, of course, on the set. On the screen? The screen, as soon as the lights go out, is no longer a surface but a space. Not a wall, as the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel, but more like a sky. A sky filled with events and people. From where else would film stars come if not from a film sky?

  The scale and grain of the cinema screen enhance the sky effect. This is why cinema films shown on small TV screens lose so much of their sense of destiny. The meetings are no longer in a sky but in a kind of cupboard.

  At the end of a play, the actors, abandoning the characters they have been playing, come to the footlights to take their bow. The applause they receive is a sign of recognition for their having brought the drama into the theatre tonight. At the end of a film, those protagonists who are still alive have to move on. We have been following them, stalking them, and, finally, out there, they have to elude us. Cinema is perpetually about leaving.

  ‘If there is an aesthetics of the cinema,’ said René Clair, ‘it can be summarised in one word: movement.’ One word: movies.

  Maybe this is why so many couples, when they go to the cinema, hold hands, as they don’t in the theatre. A response to the dark, people say. Perhaps a response to the travelling too. Cinema seats are like those in a jet plane.

  When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of a book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own. Film is too close to the real to be able to do this. And so it has no home ground. It is always coming and going. In a story which is read, suspense simply involves waiting. In a film it involves displacement.

  To show that it is in the very nature of film to shuttle us between a here and a there, let us think of Bresson’s first masterpiece — Un Condamné à Mort s’Est Echappé. Watching it, we scarcely ever leave the prisoner, Fontaine, who is either in his cell or in the exercise yard. Meticulously, step by step, we follow him preparing for his escape. The story is told in a very linear way, like one of the ropes Fontaine is making to escape with. It must be one of the most unilinear films ever made. Yet all the while, on the soundtrack we hear the guards in the prison corridors and on the staircases, and, beyond, the sound of trains passing. (How much the cinema was in love with locomotives!) We remain here with Fontaine in his cell; but our imagination is being pulled to there, where the guards are doing their rounds, or to there, where men at liberty can still take trains. Continually, we are made aware of an elsewhere. This is part of the inevitable method of film narration.

  The only way around it would be to shoot a whole story in one take and with a camera that didn’t move. And the result would be a photocopy of theatre — without the all-important presence of the actors. Movies, not because we see things moving, but because a film is a shuttle service between different places and times.

  In early westerns there are those classic chase scenes in which we see a train and men on horses galloping beside it. Sometimes a rider succeeds in leaving his horse and pulling himself aboard the train. This action, so beloved by directors, is the emblematic action of cinema. All film stories use cross-overs. Usually they occur not on the screen as an event but as the consequence of editing. And it is through these cross-overs that we are made to feel the destiny of the lives we are watching.

  When we read, it is the story’s voice which conveys a sense of destiny. Films are much nearer to the accidents of life, and in them destiny is revealed in the split second of a cut or the few seconds of a dissolve. These cuts, of course, are not accidental: we know that they are intended by the film — they reveal how the film is hand in glove with the destiny working in the story. The rest of the time this destiny is lurking else-where, in the sky behind.

  It may seem that, eighty years after Griffith and Eisenstein, I’m simply saying that the secret of the Seventh Art is editing! My argument, however, concerns not the making of films, but how they work, when made, on the spectator’s imagination.

  Walt Whitman, who was born at the end of the Napoleonic age and died two years before the first reels were shot, foresaw our cinematographic vision. His intensely democratic sense of human destiny made him the poet of the cinema before the cameras were made. Listen:

  The little one sleeps in its cradle,

  I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently

  brush away flies with my hand.

  The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up

  the bushy hill,

  I peeringly view them from the top.

  The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the

  bedroom,

  I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note

  where the pistol has fallen.

  (Song of Myself, section 8)

  Film narration has another unique quality. The French critic Lucien Sève once said that a film shot offers scarcely more explanations than reality itself, and from this arises its enigmatic power to ‘cling to the surface of things’. André Bazin wrote, ‘Cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real.’ Even as we wait to be transported elsewhere, we are held fascinated by the presence of what has come towards us out of the sky. The most familiar sights — a child sleeping, a man climbing a staircase — become mysterious when filmed. The mystery derives from our closeness to the event and from the fact that the filmed event still retains a multiplicity of possible meanings. What we are being shown has, at one and the same time, something of the focus, the intentionality, of art, and the unpredictability of reality.

  Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except for the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.

  Films which are null and void are so not because of their trivial stories but because there is nothing else but story. All the events they show have been tailor-made for the story and have no recalcitrant body to them. There are no real surfaces to cling to.

  Paradoxically, the more familiar the event, the more it can surprise us. The surprise is that of rediscovering the world (a child asleep, a man, a staircase) after an absence elsewhere. The absence may have been very brief, but in the sky we lose our sense of time. Nobody has used this surprise in his films more crucially than Tarkovsky. With him we come back to the world with the love and caring of ghosts who left it.

  No other narrative art can get as close as the cinema to the variety, the texture, the skin of daily life. But its unfolding, its coming into being, its marriage with the Elsewhere, reminds us of a longing, or a prayer.

  Fellini asks:

  What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. Before this metaphysical reality we are all of us provincial. Who are the true citizens of transcendence? The Saints. But it’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier-country between the tangible world and the intangible one — which is really the realm of the artist.

  Ingmar Bergman says:

  Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of the soul.

  From the beginning the cinema’s talent for inventing dreams was seized upon. This faculty of the medium is why cinema industries have often become dr
eam factories, in the most pejorative sense of the term, producing soporifics.

  Yet there is no film that does not partake of dream. And the great films are dreams which reveal. No two moments of revelation are the same. The Gold Rush is very different from Pather Panchali. Nevertheless, I want to ask the question: What is the longing that film expresses and, at its best, satisfies? Or, what is the nature of this filmic revelation?

  Film stories, as we have seen, inevitably place us in an Elsewhere, where we cannot be at home. Once again the contrast with television is revealing. TV focuses on its audience being at home. Its serials and soap operas are all based on the idea of a home from home. In the cinema, by contrast, we are travellers. The protagonists are strangers to us. It may be hard to believe this, since we often see these strangers at their most intimate moments, and since we may be profoundly moved by their story. Yet no individual character in a film do we know — as we know, say, Julien Sorel, or Macbeth, Natasha Rostova, or Tristram Shandy. We cannot get to know them, for the cinema’s narrative method means that we can only encounter them, not live with them. We meet in a sky where nobody can stay.

  How then does the cinema overcome this limitation to attain its special power? It does so by celebrating what we have in common, what we share. The cinema longs to go beyond individuality.

  Think of Citizen Kane, an arch individualist. At the beginning of the story he dies, and the film tries to put together the puzzle of who he really was. It turns out that he was multiple. If we are eventually moved by him, it is because the film reveals that somewhere Kane might have been a man like any other. As the film develops, it dissolves his individuality. Citizen Kane becomes a co-citizen with us.

  The same is not true of the Master Builder in Ibsen’s play or Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot. In Death in Venice Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach dies discreetly, privately; Visconti’s Aschenbach dies publicly and theatrically, and the difference is not merely the result of Visconti’s choices but of the medium’s narrative need. In the written version we follow Aschenbach, who retires like an animal to die in hiding. In the film version Bogarde comes towards us and dies in close-up. In his death he approaches us.

  When reading a novel, we often identify ourselves with a given character. In poetry we identify ourselves with the language itself. Cinema works in yet another way. Its alchemy is such that the characters come to identify themselves with us! The only art in which this can happen.

  Take the old-age pensioner, Umberto D., in De Sica’s masterpiece. He has been made anonymous by age, indifference, poverty, homelessness. He has nothing to live for and he wants to kill himself. At the end of the story, only the thought of what will happen to his dog prevents him from doing so. But by now this nameless man has, for us, come to represent life. Consequently, his dog becomes an obscure hope for the world. As the film unfolds, Umberto D. begins to abide in us. The biblical term defines with surprising precision how De Sica’s film — and any successful narrative film — has to work. Heroes and heroines, defeated or triumphant, come out of the sky to abide in us. At this moment Elsewhere becomes everywhere.

  Umberto D. comes to abide in us because the film reminds us of all the reality that we potentially share with him, and because it discards the reality which distinguishes him from us, which has made him separate and alone. The film shows what happened to the old man in life and, in the showing, opposes it. This is why film — when it achieves art — becomes like a human prayer. Simultaneously a plea and an attempt to redeem.

  The star system too, in a paradoxical way, is dependent upon sharing. We know very well that a star is not just the actress or actor. The latter merely serve the star — often tragically. The star always has a different and mythic name. The star is a figure accepted by the public as an archetype. This is why the public enjoy and recognize a star playing, relatively undisguised, many different roles in different films. The overlapping is an advantage, not a hindrance. Each time, the star pulls the role, pulls the character in the film story, towards her or his archetype.

  The difficulty of labelling the archetypes should not encourage us to underestimate their importance.

  Take Laurel and Hardy. They form a couple. Because they do so, women are marginal in the stories of their films. Laurel quite often dresses up as a woman. Both of them — in their sublime comic moments — have certain habitual gestures which are distinctly ‘effeminate’. So why is it that they do not register in the public imagination as homosexual? It is because, archetypally, Laurel and Hardy are kids — somewhere between the ages of seven and eleven. The public imagination perceives them as kid wreckers of an adult world order. And therefore, given their archetype age, they are not yet sexual beings! It is thanks to their archetype that they are not sexually labelled.

  Finally, let’s return to the fact that film pulls us into the visible world: the one into which we are thrown at birth and which we all share. Painting does not do this; it interrogates the visible. Nor does still photography — for all still photographs are about the past. Only movies pull us into the present and the visible, the visible which surrounds us all.

  Film doesn’t have to say ‘tree’: it can show a tree. It doesn’t have to describe a crowd: it can be in one. It doesn’t have to find an adjective for mud; it can be up to the wheels in it. It doesn’t have to analyse a face, it can approach one. It doesn’t have to lament, it can show tears.

  Here is Whitman, prophetically imagining the screen image as it addresses the public:

  Translucent mould of me it shall be you!

  Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!

  Firm masculine colter it shall be you!

  Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!

  You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings

  of my life!

  Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be

  you!

  My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!

  Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!

  Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall

  be you!

  Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!

  Sun so generous it shall be you!

  Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!

  (Song of Myself, section 24)

  Most films, of course, do not achieve universality. Nor can the universal be consciously pursued — for such an ambition leads only to pretension or rhetoric. I have been trying to understand the modality of how cinema occasionally bestows universality upon a film-maker’s work. Usually it is in response to love or compassion. At such moments cinema does something very complicated in a simpler way than any other art can. Here are two examples.

  In Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante a sailor marries a peasant girl. We see the couple come out of church at the end of a joyless, almost sinister, ceremony, with all the men dressed in black, intimidated by the priest, and with old women whispering scandal. Then the sailor takes his wife home to his barge on a river. She is swung aboard on a yardarm by the crew, who consist of a kid and an old man. The Atalante casts off and sails away on its long journey to Paris. Perhaps it is dusk. The bride, still in white, slowly walks along the length of the barge towards the prow. Alone, she is being borne away and she walks solemnly, as if to another altar that is no longer a sinister one. On the bank a woman with a child sees her passing down the river, and she crosses herself as if she has just seen a vision. And she has. She has seen at that moment a vision of every bride in the world.

  In the Mean Streets of Martin Scorsese, a gang of neighbourhood friends put up daily, makeshift shelters against the flames. They do this separately and together. The flames are those of hell. The shelters are: wisecracks, shoot-outs, whiskeys, memories of innocence, a windfall of a hundred bucks, a new shirt. New York Italian Catholics, they know about Jesus, but here, on the Lower East Side, there is no redemp
tion; everyone is on the back of everyone, trying not to sink down into the pit. Charlie is the only one capable of bullshit pity, though he can save nobody. Driving away from yet another fight, he says out loud: ‘I know things haven’t gone well tonight, Lord, but I’m trying.’ And, in that instant, which is buried in the shit of Manhattan, he becomes the repentant child in all of us and a soul in Dante’s Hell — Dante, whose vision of the Inferno was modelled after the cities he knew in his time.

  What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all of mankind. It is not an art of the princes or of 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. Its essential subject — in our century of disappearances — is the soul to which it offers a global refuge. This, I believe, is the key to its longing and its appeal.

  1990

  That Which Is Held

  I am thinking in front of Giorgione’s Tempest and I want to begin with a quotation from Osip Mandelstam: ‘For Dante time is the content of history felt as a single synchronic act. And inversely the purpose of history is to keep time together so that all are brothers and companions in the same quest and conquest of time.’

  Of all that we have inherited from the nineteenth century, only certain axioms about time have passed largely unquestioned. The left and right, evolutionists, physicists, and most revolutionaries, all accept — at least on a historical scale — the nineteenth-century view of a unilinear and uniform ‘flow’ of time.

  Yet the notion of a uniform time within which all events can be temporally related depends upon the synthesizing capacity of a mind. Galaxies and particles in themselves propose nothing. We face at the start a phenomenological problem. We are obliged to begin with a conscious experience.