Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Series

HOLD EVERYTHING DEAR: JOHN BERGER AND CINEMA

July 31 – August 5

July 31-August 5, 2026

Perhaps best known as the host of WAYS OF SEEING, the 1972 BBC program that introduced a generation to the ideological analysis of visual art, John Berger was one of the most important writers of the last century. Across an oeuvre comprising modernist novels, breathtaking analyses of painting and photography, reports on life in Palestine, correspondences with revolutionaries like Subcomandante Marcos, and much else, Berger’s generosity, intelligence, and uncompromising integrity made him an exemplary left-wing public intellectual. A committed Marxist all his life, he was the rare critic for whom art was, always and necessarily, a site of both power and beauty; proud of being called a political propagandist, he said, “but my heart and eye have remained that of a painter.”

2026 marks Berger’s centennial, and at a moment when the faculty of vision has been exploited, standardized, and wedded to atrocity like never before, Film Comment will shine a light on a lesser-known dimension of his work and legacy: its affinity with cinema. Taking place from July 29 to August 2 at Film at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of the Moving Image, and Metrograph, this series will feature a selection of films which Berger worked on, wrote about, or inspired, along with talks that reinvigorate his intellectual and political legacy for contemporary film culture.

Here at Anthology, we’ll be presenting a film that was heavily influenced by Berger’s work (Robert Kramer’s WALK THE WALK), one of the several films that Berger co-wrote with Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner (THE SALAMANDER), a documentary about Berger’s life and work (THE SEASONS IN QUINCY), and two television films that were adapted (with Berger’s participation) from his books and essays (PIG EARTH and PARTING SHOTS FROM ANIMALS).

Special thanks to Pip Chodorov and Diana Vidrascu (Re:Voir); Bob Hunter (Icarus Films); Gérard Ruey (Association Alain Tanner); and the BBC.

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