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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

John Berger

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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
Continuity
Spontaneous
Cinema
Saved
Mankind
Achieve
Art
Vagrants
Achieves

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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.
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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 fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.
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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
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We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
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[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
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Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why but the editorialists forget it terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.
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What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
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A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
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The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
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To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
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