Ways of seeing
Jun. 21st, 2007 05:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWhat would I say to the world if the BBC made me a "television essayist" and gave me a series? I might make a programme called London: a modest proposal, like my Click Opera entry of June 21st, 2005:
"All you'd need to do to make London really quite a wonderful place is route all motorised traffic underground, send the businessmen to Birmingham and Hong Kong, install air conditioning everywhere, rip up the grey fitted carpet and install wood floors, change all the food and chefs, halve the price of everything, scrap fees for Japanese art students, introduce the euro and ban the journalists from writing about class. Oh, and turn all the TV and radio stations over to the insane."
I like to think my television essay would be something like John Berger's brilliant, polemical 1972 television series Ways of Seeing. Here are a few precious clips of it which have recently turned up on YouTube, on the subject of advertising:
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I love the way Berger makes three studies of the dreamworlds created by advertisements, or flicks through the Sunday Times colour supplement and (Victor Burgin-style) calls the juxtaposition of editorial nightmares (images of Bangladeshi refugees) with sensual advertising dreams "mad". Do we have television essayists today condemning our culture as a mad one? I suppose the great Adam Curtis springs to mind.
Berger, of course, is still around. Give him another series, BBC! And in the meantime, someone put the rest of Ways of Seeing up on YouTube!
"All you'd need to do to make London really quite a wonderful place is route all motorised traffic underground, send the businessmen to Birmingham and Hong Kong, install air conditioning everywhere, rip up the grey fitted carpet and install wood floors, change all the food and chefs, halve the price of everything, scrap fees for Japanese art students, introduce the euro and ban the journalists from writing about class. Oh, and turn all the TV and radio stations over to the insane."
I like to think my television essay would be something like John Berger's brilliant, polemical 1972 television series Ways of Seeing. Here are a few precious clips of it which have recently turned up on YouTube, on the subject of advertising:
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I love the way Berger makes three studies of the dreamworlds created by advertisements, or flicks through the Sunday Times colour supplement and (Victor Burgin-style) calls the juxtaposition of editorial nightmares (images of Bangladeshi refugees) with sensual advertising dreams "mad". Do we have television essayists today condemning our culture as a mad one? I suppose the great Adam Curtis springs to mind.
Berger, of course, is still around. Give him another series, BBC! And in the meantime, someone put the rest of Ways of Seeing up on YouTube!