John Berger is protean, although the seas in which he has been involved are the watchable and readable and not the watery kind. He has been, at various times throughout a richly productive year-long career, a filmmaker, screenwriter, art critic, essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, actor and drawer. The Seasons in Quincy is a minute-long documentary that sets out to reveal the essence of his complicated being through four simple portraits, each one corresponding to a season. But there is nothing predictable about the way in which the directors approach their subject.
Berger has consistently said that regardless of the genre in which he was working, he has only been a storyteller, and the four directors take their cue from that pronouncement. Each of the seasons is a portrait and each of the portraits is a story. But neither of them spoke about their wartime experience, a reticence their children, writer and actor, talk about as Swinton cores apples for a crisp that will be eaten at the end of the portrait, and the recipe for which will be provided as the credits appear.
The winter portrait is a bit self-consciously cozy in its domesticity and stagy in its presentation. The portrait also includes a segment from a film adaptation of one of his stories called Play Me Something , in which Swinton plays a hairdresser and Berger a mysterious stranger who tells a story of a Venetian love affair.
He is obliged to be an actor in his own life, and what results is a sense of uncomfortableness, for both poet and viewer. There is even an interview with Jacques Derrida in which he talks about his surprised embarrassment at being caught naked before his cat. It leads to a cameo appearance in which one of the film crew plays body double to Derrida by standing naked in front of an expansive window. The third portrait takes the form of a panel on politics, videotaped in Mieussy in the French Alps.
It is the story of the song of words and ideas, and along with Berger and the literary critic and director Colin MacCabe, includes three very smart young writers, Christopher Roth, the poet and activist Akshi Singh, and the American novelist and poet, Ben Lerner.
