Ways of Seeing – 1st Episode | LEFFEST - Lisboa Film Festival

The first of this four-episode BBC miniseries created by John Berger and directed and produced by the English documentary filmmaker Mike Dibb, is based on Walter Benjamin's influential book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and questions the usual claims made about the European tradition of painting, as well as the way in which the invention of the film camera changed the perception of the world – not just what we see but also the way we see it. This series, which was adapted into an equally influential, homonym book, was intended to be a response to another miniseries of the same genre, Civilisation (1969), by Kenneth Clarke, considered by Berger as representing a more traditionalist view of art and culture.

Duration: 30
Production year: 1972
Country: United Kingdom
Subtitles: Original Version EN

Mike Dibb

Mike Dibb is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, most of which made for television, covering film, art, literature, music, science, sport and popular culture. After completing a degree at Trinity College, Dublin, he was hired in 1963 by BBC TV. He worked as an editor in the Film department until 1967, when he moved to the Music and Arts department, where he remained until 1981. During this period he directed several films, including multiple collaborations with writer John Berger (who in 2015 was a guest at LEFFEST ), the most well-known of which is the four-part series Ways of Seeing, awarded the BAFTA for Best Specialty Series and which later became a book translated and published worldwide, one of the most important for several generations of artists and students of art. Dibb has also made some films about writers, such as Octavio Paz, Lorca, A-S. Byatt or Elmore Leonard. In 1981, he joined Third Eyes Productions, where he continued to direct and produce, primarily for Channel Four. In 1986, he created his own production company, Dibb Directions Ltd. He collaborated with the BBC once again, making films and series such as Made In Latin America, about Latin American culture. In 1994, he co-directed with Stephen Frears the documentary Typically British, about the history of British cinema. His film The Miles Davis Story won the Royal Philharmonic Society Television Award and an Emmy for Best Art Documentary of the Year (2001). He also made a film about Keith Jarrett and another about the composer and bandoneon player Astor Piazolla.

Ways of Seeing – 1st Episode

Original title: Ways of Seeing

Mike Dibb

Credits