00:00I am surrounded by a kind of circular, continuous drawing.
00:05John Berger started off life as an artist,
00:08but soon added art critic and broadcaster to his palette.
00:11The arranging of artists in an order of merit
00:14seems to me to be an idle game.
00:16What matters are the needs which art answers.
00:19He worked on iconic television programmes like Monitor.
00:23In 1962, he left Britain and moved to France in self-imposed exile.
00:29You like this cafe?
00:30It's one of my favourites.
00:32I've begun working in cafes now.
00:37His 1972 Ways of Seeing changed the way we all looked at great works of art
00:42and made them seem like part of our every day.
00:45Take this original painting in the National Gallery.
00:49Only what you are seeing is still not the original.
00:54I spoke to him about Bente's sketchbook.
00:56His new work reimagining the lost drawings of the 17th century philosopher Spinoza.
01:01Why Spinoza?
01:03He has interested me as a philosopher for most of my life.
01:09I mean, anyway, since I was a young man.
01:12He's interesting because he says this dualism,
01:17really invented by Descartes, who was a little older than him,
01:21that's to say the dualism between the existent being on one hand material
01:27and on the other spiritual, if you wish.
01:30This is nonsense.
01:32They in fact make a whole. They are a unity.
01:35But he's a philosopher, he's a thinker.
01:37He was also, because he had to support himself, a maker of things.
01:40Yes, he was a lens grinder.
01:42Which helps you see differently or helps you see better.
01:45And that's also what you do.
01:48Maybe.
01:49And he was living with a great period of new discoveries
01:53thanks to the telescope and the microscope.
01:58So the microscopic and the macroscopic
02:02were very, very much preoccupations of his time.
02:06Needing lenses, which he ground to earn his living,
02:12having been fiercely, wildly excommunicated by the Jewish religion
02:18as a heretic and non-believer and so on and so on.
02:27There's a lovely image of the writer or the artist or you
02:31sitting in a garden sketching some plants.
02:33Yes, it's me.
02:34That's you.
02:35Yes, it's me.
02:36And there's a snail as well.
02:37Yes.
02:38That's not me.
02:39That's not you.
02:40The beginning of my drawing there was in the morning.
02:44Then I abandoned it.
02:46And then in the evening I thought I would go back and try to draw again.
02:50And that's where I couldn't find the exact bunch of plums that I was drawing.
02:56And then I recognised the snail who'd been beside me the first time.
03:02And thanks to his or her presence, I could re-find what I was drawing.
03:08Drawing is a constant correcting of errors.
03:13Maybe a great deal of creation is actually that.
03:16There's not really a point when you're suddenly aware
03:19that there's nothing more to correct.
03:21And if you were aware of that, it would probably be very bad.
03:24Do you think also some of this book is about time passing,
03:28your past and the influences on you?
03:31No, I mean, I don't think that it is in any way a sort of autobiography.
03:36It seems to me that...
03:39..what it's really, it's a book, I hope,
03:43that it's a book about looking at the actual world in which we live today,
03:50which is both horrific in many ways
03:54and, of course, also, at moments, incredibly beautiful.
03:58My political views are an intrinsic part of my view of the truth
04:03and of how I see life.
04:05The label Marxist, which was put on you,
04:07I mean, do you see that in any way helpful?
04:10I have claimed myself to be a Marxist.
04:12I mean, it's not something that I deny.
04:15What I mean by that is that my reading of Marx from a very early age
04:22helped me enormously to understand history
04:27and therefore to understand where we are in history
04:32and therefore to understand...
04:37..what we have to envisage as a future,
04:43thinking about human dignity and justice.
04:47In that sense, is it still helpful today?
04:50If we look at what is happening to the world
04:53and the decisions being taken every day
04:57and all those decisions really made in the name of one priority,
05:02that priority of increasing, ever-increasing profit,
05:07at that moment, Marx doesn't seem quite so obsolete, does he?
05:11In your heart, you're a storyteller, aren't you?
05:13Yes. That's what you are.
05:14Yes, I completely agree with you.
05:16I mean, I feel that I'm a storyteller.
05:19That's all. That's all. Storyteller.
05:21But the trouble with storytellers is they can be seen as very dangerous.
05:25Well, dangerous to what and to whom?
05:28That's the question.
05:32If I am dangerous to those who run the new economic order,
05:40I'm proud of that.
