The Seasons in Quincy' is the result of a five-year project by Tilda Swinton, Colin MacCabe and Christopher Roth to produce a portrait of the intellectual and storyteller John Berger. It was produced by the Derek Jarman Lab, an audio-visual hub for graduate filmmaking based at Birkbeck, University of London, in collaboration with the composer Simon Fisher Turner.
Despite its title, this quartet of short profiles says as much about the film-makers as it does John Berger, the writer, painter and art critic responsible for Booker Prize winner G, influential BBC TV series Ways of Seeing and films like Alain Tanner's Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. In Colin MacCabe's Ways of Listening, Berger and actress Tilda Swinton ruminate upon what they have in common while making a crumble in Berger's house in rural eastern France. Swinton returns to direct the closing vignette, Harvest, which centres on the friendship between her twins and Berger's son, Yves. But there's less easy-going affection or shrewd insight in Christopher Roth's Spring, which focuses on Berger's Marxist/humanist love of animals and his late wife Beverly Bancroft, and MacCabe and Bartek Dziadosz's A Song for Politics, an archly photographed writers' round table. Clearly, the plan was to laud Berger and his radical approaches to art and life. But this mishmash of archival clips, stylistic tics and smugly talking heads proves hugely disappointing.
| role | name |
|---|---|
| John Berger | John Berger (1) |
| Tilda Swinton | Tilda Swinton |
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Director | Colin MacCabe |
| Director | Christopher Roth |
| Director | Bartek Dziadosz |
| Director | Tilda Swinton |
