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; he was 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 that Berger worked on, wrote about, or inspired, along with talks that reinvigorate his intellectual and political legacy for contemporary film culture.

The series begins July 29 at Film at Lincoln Center with Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giuseppe Bertolucci’s rarely screened La rabbia di Pasolini on 35mm.

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