INTERVIEW: Colin MacCabe turns his lens on John Berger in ‘Seasons in Quincy’

By all accounts, The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger is a unique, unconventional documentary, but that’s largely because its subject is equally unique and unconventional. The film, which is currently playing the Film Forum in New York City, is that rare indie where form matches substance, medium influences message.

Four directors combined their efforts to spend some time with Berger, a self-avowed “storyteller” who has influenced the worlds of art, criticism, history, poetry, philosophy, film and literature. Perhaps his most famous work is the miniseries Ways of Seeing. He has so many hyphens to his name that it’s no wonder it took four directors to capture some of his academic and personal essence.

The four filmmakers are Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz and Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton. “Well, I first got attached to it in a car park in Park City, [Utah,] where about 2 o’clock in the morning in a snowstorm, and we just finished showing a film that I produced in which Tilda helped us to make on Derek Jarman,” MacCabe said recently in a phone interview. “And she said, ‘Why don’t we do John?’ So that was where it started.”

There wasn’t much to the initial idea. The unique approach of having four directors tell Berger’s story across the span of four seasons in his small village of the French Alps came much later. At first, MacCabe and company simply wanted to experiment, much like Berger himself.

“My immediate thought was that I had absolutely sworn that I was never going to make another film after Derek because I had absolutely sworn I was never going to go and ask another television executive for money,” MacCabe said about his Jarman documentary from almost 10 years ago. “And I had at that time just given graduate students of mine cameras and editing equipment, and they trained themselves up to a very good professional level. And I suddenly thought, why don’t I do it with my students and also do it in such a way that we don’t necessarily have to come back with anything except a few minutes for the website.”

MacCabe began the project with his students. They arrived in the French Alps right before Christmas, and a blizzard snowed them in for a few days. After the storm, they shot the short film, and as MacCabe was looking at the rough cuts in the hotel room, Swinton came in with some news. “Tilda came in and said, ‘Well, we’ve got to make another three,’” he remembers her saying. “So that was the point at which the notion of making four films rather than one came up. Then it became a bit more deliberate.”

Now, looking back at the final 90-minute film, MacCabe said he believes the production was slightly blessed. They didn’t start out making a portrait, and yet the final product is a series of portraits that show different sides of Berger.

Of course, to make a proper portrait of Berger would take hours and hours of film. The man has been academically and creatively active for decades, and many artists, including Swinton and MacCabe, count him as an influence and friend. The Seasons in Quincy is not long or exhaustive; instead, the documentary goes deeper by emphasizing brevity and poetry, offering a taste of the man through the eyes of different directors.

MacCabe was only 18 years old when he first encountered Berger’s work. “It goes back to when I was 18 and read A Fortune of Man and thought it was one of the greatest books I’d ever read, and then it continued with [The Success and Failure of] Picasso when I was an undergraduate,” MacCabe said of Berger’s writing. “And then I read G, I think, as I had just graduated and thought it was one of the greatest novels I’d ever read.”

Eventually MacCabe switched professionally from being an academic to being a producer, and he received a call from Channel 4 in the United Kingdom to help out with a “weird project” called Play Me Something, a movie written by Berger and Timothy Neat. As soon as MacCabe realized Berger was involved, he was hooked and became executive producer.

“I was so pleased to be doing it, and I had worked several times with Tilda at that point,” MacCabe said. “And I thought it would be good to get her into the film, and I rang her up. … I said, ‘Do you know who I mean by John Berger?’ Before I said anything else, she said, ‘I’m in.’ And we made that film, Play Me Something, and that was the first time I met him.”

MacCabe also employed Berger’s help when making A Spectre of Hope, a film about famed photographer Sebastião Salgado. The Seasons in Quincy ended up being the third collaboration between the two, although it didn’t always go as planned. “He wasn’t open to the idea at all,” MacCabe said of Berger. “I remember ringing him up, and I said, ‘John we want to come and make a film about you.’ And he said, ‘Nothing could be more delightful than you coming and hanging out with me, and we’ll go, and shop and cook. But if you want me to sit and talk about my life, forget it. Nothing could interest me less.’”

The focus shifted to the four portraits in a more relaxed fashion, and The Seasons in Quincy started to form. Still, MacCabe wasn’t convinced there was a movie to be found among the footage.

“I had this magical moment in my life where we put them all together, and I sat in a preview theater with about 20 people,” MacCabe said. “The first time we thought about a film audience was when we finished it. It gets very different reactions, mainly positive, but I mean it’s interesting how in different places, different audiences much prefer this episode or that episode. It really does seem to vary, and in Berlin, which is where we showed it first, there was immense enthusiasm for the … academic bits. Other audiences prefer the un-academic bits. I like it all, so I’m happy with it as it is. I think the main thing we wanted to do was to give some sense of what a wonderful and interesting person Berger is, and I think that comes across.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger is currently playing the Film Forum in New York City. Click here for more information.