For that to become possible in the modern media of communication, access to television must be extended beyond these present narrow limits. The images may be like words but there is no dialogue yet. At the end of the episode, Berger, faces the camera and states:ħ“but remember that I am controlling and using for my own purposes the means of reproduction needed for these programmes.
#John berger ways of seeing. series#
If we discover why this is so we should also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.”ĥOn the surface, the subject appears to relate to art history-the series is divided into four parts-European painting, female nude, oil painting, advertising (from oil painting to photography), but in fact Berger follows the principles and methodologies of radical and critical art history, practices emerging since the early 1970s thanks to which art history “has become much more open, interrogative (questioning), and self-critical” (Harris).ĦCentral to this is making visible the role of the narrator in “institutional reproduction of knowledge, specifically in his case, questioning the role of a television art series as this one in reproducing the discipline of art history, “helping to supply what comes to stand as art-historical Authority and Truth” (ibid) and producing viewers equipped with fixed perspectives.
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3Berger’s voice introducing the series is accompanied by the sound of ripping canvas whilst the camera zooms into the cropped Venus head:Ĥ“This is the first of four programmes in which I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting, that tradition that is born around 1400 and died about 1900 Tonight it isn’t so much the paintings themselves which I want to consider as the way we now see them Now in the second half of the 20th century because we see these paintings as nobody saw them before.