John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 2 (1972)

A BAFTA award-winning series with John Berger, which rapidly became regarded as one of the most influential art programmes ever made. This second programme deals with the portrayal of the female nude, an important part of the tradition of European art. Berger examines these paintings and asks whether they celebrate women as they really are or only as men would like them to be.

Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger's scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series is partially a response to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon.

Οι άντρες ονειρεύονται τις γυναίκες
Οι γυναίκες ονειρεύονται τον εαυτό τους να τις ονειρεύονται

Οι άντρες κοιτούν τις γυναίκες
Οι γυναίκες βλέπουν τον εαυτό τους να τον κοιτούν

Οι γυναίκες διαρκώς συναντούν βλέματα που λειτουργούν σαν καθρέφτες

υπενθυμίζοντας τους την εμφάνισή τους ή πώς αυτή θα έπρεπε να είναι.

Πίσω από κάθε ματιά υπάρχει μια κρίση.

Κάποιες φορές η ματιά μου συναντούν είναι η δική τους, αντανακλούμενη από έναν πραγματικό καθρέφτη.

Μια γυναίκα πάντα συνοδεύεται, εκτός όταν

είναι τελείως μόνη της. Και μπορεί ακόμα και τότε, από

την εικόνα του ίδιου της του εαυτού. Καθώς περπατάει,

διασχίζοντας ένα δωμάτιο, ή κλαίγοντας για τον θάνατο του πατέρα της

δεν μπορεί να αποφύγει να συλλαμβάνει τον εαυτό της, να περπατάει ή να κλαίει

από την παιδική ηλικία, διδάσκεται και πείθεται να επιθεωρεί τον εαυτό της συνεχώς

Πρέπει να επιθεωρεί όλα όσα είναι και όλα όσα κάνει διότι

Ο τρόπος που εμφανίζεται στους άλλους και ειδικότερα ο τρόπος που εμφανίζεται στους άντρες

είναι ζωτικής σημασίας, καθότι

[music]

A woman in the culture of privileged Europeans,

is first and foremost a sight to be looked at.

What kind of sight is revealed in the average European oil painting

There were portraits of women as there were portraits of men.

but in one category of painting, women were the principle

ever occuring subject, that category was the nude.

In the nudes of European painting, we can discover some of the criteria

and conventions by which women were judged.

We can see how women were seen.

What then is a nude?

In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being

naked is simply being without clothes

the nude, according to him, is a form of art

I would put it differently.

To be naked is to be oneself.

To be nude is to be seen naked by others and

yet not recognized as oneself. A nude

has to be seen as an object in order to be nude.

In the European oil painting, nakedness is not taken for granted

as in archaic art. Nakedness is a sight for those who are dressed.

That is why Manners's painting which really marks the end of a period I am considering is so

profound a comment on all the works that preceded it.

the story begins with the story of Adam and Eve as told in Genesis.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and it was a delight for the eyes,

and that the tree was desired to make one wise

she took of the fruit thereof and did eat

and she gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat.

and the eyes of them both were opened, and they

knew that they were naked

and the Lord God called out to the man and said

Where art thou? and he said

I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid

and I hid myself

unto the woman God said, "I will greatly

multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow, thou shall bring forth children,

and they desire will be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

Two things are striking about this story.

They become aware of being naked because, as a result of

eating the apple, each sees the other differently

nakedness is created in the mind of the beholder.

The second striking fact is that the woman

is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man

In relationship to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.

In medieval art, the story is often illustrated scene following scene

as in a strip cartoon.

During the Renaissance, the narrative sequence disappears, and the single moment

which is nearly always depicted, is the moment of shame.

The couple wear fig leaves or make a modest gesture with their hands

but now, their shame is not so much in relationship to one another as is to the spectator.

It is the spectator looking which shames them.

Later, as painting became more secular,

many other subjects offer the opportunity for painting nudes.

But always in the European tradition, the nude implies an awareness of being seen

by the spectator. They are not

naked as they are, they are naked as you see them.

Often, as with the favorite subject of Suzanna and the elders,

this is the actual theme of the picture.

We join the elders to spy on her.

She looks back at us looking at her.

Sometimes the woman, Suzanna, looks at herself

in the mirror, picturing herself as men see her.

She sees herself first and foremost as a sight

which means as a sight for men.

Thus the mirror is a symbol of the vanity of women

yet the male hypocrisy in this is blatant.

You paint a naked women because you enjoy looking at her

you put a mirror in her hand, and you call the painting vanity

thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you have

depictured for your own pleasure

And thus, incidentally, repeating the biblical incident by

blaming the woman

The Judgement of Paris is another famous mythological subject with the same

in written idea of looking at naked women and judging them.

Paris awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful.

Beauty in this context is bound to become competitive.

The judgement of Paris is transformed into a beauty contest.

Aesthetics when applied to women are not

as disinterested as the word beauty

might suggest

I don't want to deny the crucial part that seeing

plays in sexuality, but there's a great difference in being seen

as oneself naked or being seen by another in that way

and a body being put on display

To be naked, is to be without disguise.

To be on display, is to have the surface of one's own skin,

the hairs of one's own body

turned into a disguise.

A disguise which cannot be discarded.

Amongst the tens of thousands of European oil paintings

of nudes, there are perhaps 20 or 30 exceptions, paintings in which the

artist has seen the woman revealed as herself.

this Rubens

this Rembrant

this George De La Tour

These paintings are as personal as love poems

and their character is quite distinctive

Most nudes oil paintings have been lined up

by their painters for the pleasure of the

male spectator only

who will assess and judge them

as sights

Their nudity is another form of dress

They are condemned to never being naked

with their clothes off, they are as formal

as with their clothes on

Those who are not judged beautiful, are not beautiful.

Those who are, are given the prize.

The prize is to be owned.

That is to say, to be available.

Charles II commissioned this secret painting

from Lale. It's like hundreds of others,

it might be Venus and Cupid, but

in fact, it was a portrait of one of his mistresses Nell Gwen.

He chose her passively looking at the

spectator staring at her naked.

Her nakedness is not an expression of her own feelings

it is only a sign of her submission to his demand

The painting, when he shows it to others,

demonstrates this submission. His guests envy him.

By contrast, in another tradition, nakedness is a celebration of

active sexual love as between two people,

the woman as active as the man

the actions of each absorb the other.

In oil painting, the second person or the second

person who matters it the person looking at the painting.

Compare these two women.

One the model for what is considered a masterpiece by Eng

and the other an ill paid model for a photograph in a girly magazine

Or these two

just the expresssion, the look,

what do you see?

It seems to me that in each pair, the expression

is remarkably similar, and it is an

expression of responding with remarkable charm

to the man who she knows is looking at her

although she doesn't know him

It is true that sometimes a painting includes

a male lover, but the woman's attention is very rarely

directed towards him. She looks away from him

or she looks out of the picture towards he who

considers himself her true lover, the spectator-owner

this painting was sent as a present from the Grand Duke of Florence to the King of France

The boy kneeling on the cushion and kissing

is Cupid the woman is Venus

But the way her body is arranged has nothing to do with

that kissing. Her body is arranged the way it is to display it

to the man looking at the picture

the picture is made to appeal to his sexuality

it has nothing to do with her sexuality

The convention of not painting the hair on a woman's body helps towards the same end.

Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion.

The woman's sexual passion, needs to be

minimized, so that the spectator feels

that he has the monopoly of such passion.

There were paintings which depicted

male lovers. These did exist.

But they were mostly private, semi-pornographic

pictures. In most paintings, which were painted to be seen

rather than hidden, the only rival to the male

spectator is a cupid.

Now, how extraordinary it is that the

pictorial symbol of passion is a small boy.

For a similar reason, women in the European art of the oil painting are seldom seen dancing.

They have to be shown languid, exhibiting a minimum of energy.

They are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.

The appetite was theoretically gargantuan.

The absurdity of this male flattery, although it was not seen as absurd then

reached its peak in the public academic art of the 19th C

prime ministers discussed under paintings like this

when one of him felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation

the nude in European oil painting

is usually presented as an ideal subject

it is said to be an expression of the European humanist spirit

I don't want to reject entirely the truth of this,

but I have tried to add to it

starting off from a different viewpoint.

Duer who believed in the ideal nude

thought that this ideal could be constructed

by taking the shoulders from one body

the hands of another, the breasts of another,

and so on

Was this humanist idealism?

Or was it the result of the indifference

to who any one person really was?

Do these paintings celebrate

as we're normally taught

the women within them?

or the male voyeur?

Is there sexuality within the frame?

or in front of it?

I showed the program, as you have seen it, up to now, to five women.

It began to seem absurd that the only images

that you are seeing are of women

silent, mute

So, I showed it to them and asked them to comment.

To comment not so much on the program

but rather on the questions raised by it

Above all, on the question of how men see women

or how they have seen them in the past.

And how this influences the way women see

themselves today.

We have an image, of

Of course, we all have an image of ourselves

and it is a visual image, but I wonder how

much this sort of classical European painting

has shaped that image.

In my own case, I find it quite impossible when I

look at the paintings you show, in your film, I can't

take them seriously, I cannot identify with them

because they are so immensely exaggerated.

Always, you know, they fasten onto some secondary

sexual characteristic, these enormous breasts,

these beasting bottoms, those huge things like that

and they just aren't real. Whereas with

photographs, you can feel that as potentially, possibly

although it probably isn't. Many of these paintings you show are idealized.

Um, and therefore, they are to me very unreal.

in connection with any deep down image that I might have of myself

or in connection with any deep down

pleasure I might have

when looking at another female body

they don't give me that pleasure at all

I can admire then as paintings

but they don't mean human beings to me

the image that I compare myself to

is the photograph because it is with photographs

that I have been encouraged to think of myself

in this way, it is essentially advertising to me

that has made me think of myself in this way

and consequently, I find it extremely interesting to go

back and think of nudes in this way because

I have never done so, but having seen the film

I have no doubt that the same thing applies.

And do you find the nudes in painting unreal

in the same way? yes.

Well, you can't get any information from it,

can you ? there's no guide to how you might--

what information is lacking?

well, activity. Dynamism. it is how

someone sees you and that's all,

it is laid upon you.

I'm glad you showed the men in picture

because I always find this extremely shocking

the men are dressed and the women are naked

and this seems to sum up the entire situation

because these women as well being humiliated

and I think this is part of the whole

scheme of things

as most people have had, at some station

in life, nightmares about running through the streets with nothing on

while everyone else is dressed. And this seems

to me to be one element in the picture.

One very interesting thing you said in the film was

about how nudity was really a kind of disguise,

it wasn't the real person themselves free.

But it was just another garment they were wearing

and worse than a garment, in a sense, because

it was something that you can't take off.

This comes, I think, from

nudity being combined with a pose. And that's

inevitable if you're going to have a painting

of a model. Um, in a way, I think that

we're always dressing. We're always dressing up

for a part. Always putting on a uniform of one kind of another

and I think women do this more than men

men have only been doing it fairly recently.

Women are always dressing to show the kind of

character that they want to present: the mother, the working

woman, the pretty young chick. And nudity

is a uniform, in a way, for I'm ready

for sexual pleasure. So, it doesn't. You can't

identify being nude with being free.

Only just recently read that book

which describes a way in which a woman

is reduced to the sexual pleasure she can

to a complete object provide to a man. And what struck me in all that book

that was the most impressive image is the fact that she was told

that she was never to touch her own breasts to

close her own mouth or to put her legs

together. So, the whole point about her stance

all the time is that she was available

and this sense of being available of waiting

for other people is the very antithesis of action

and you know just like the Brook Street

Bureau advertisement, Tony hasn't run. He's

three minutes late in ringing. You feel this whole

situation, the number of women you talk to who

say I stay in so many night a week, waiting for someone to ring

the concept of availability implies

passivity because if you're simply waiting for someone else to act

then you can't help yourself.

yes, it's like you will awake when a man touches

you when a man kisses you. Whether its an excuse,

to get yourself going, I think women are shy

they are waiting too long.

yes, yes.

Could I say something now about narcissism?

I think that both men and women are narcissistic

but in different senses, and I think

that one in sometimes I have the impression

that men and women are tremendously

narcissistic and are cut off from each other

from their images of themselves. But

whereas a woman's image of herself is derived

directly from other people, the mirror you're talking about

a man's image of himself is derived from

the world that is its the world that gives him back

his image because he acts in it. and the women are drawn to him as a source, as central activity,

and as a source of worth

since he is in the world, the fact

that he values her is important

and so because their centers of narcissism are different,

and the woman's is essentially only

related to the other person

she is in a much more passive position than he is

in relation to it

yes

do you see narcissism as essentially a negative

or positive phenomenon?

well, i think that is very difficult to answer

but in the sense that it is related to

an identity, um, it is a positive phenomenon

and it seems to me that what women envy in men in that

they have a sense of their

own identity

that there is something in them

that is important to them other than

simply what other people think of them

and I think that thing

is product of their interaction in the world

and it is almost as if through this interaction

they build up a store of worth

of their sense of themselves

which is a constant

it cannot be lost

and because a woman doesn't go out

and do that

she doesn't create a store

she waits for the present interaction with a man

that can go, that can end at any moment

there is something here that really

I would like to push around a little bit

because narcissism is a very pronounced

way of stating a relationship with the world

whether it is a man or a woman

but this other question which is contained

within it, but doesn't go as far as it as an idea

is this sort of self delight of a person

whether or it is a man or woman

in life, in what they're doing

in relationships with a man or woman

and it is a thing that matters tremendously

and its not only a thing that is an inner thing

by which you life

but it is a very outer thing

by which you gain relationships with

your own context in the world

that you can't gain any other way

its when you've somehow been made

so unconscious of yourself that

you easily, naturally,sort of

compulsively go out to whatever is around you

now, when you're a child that tends

with people to be other things

doesn't it?

mountains, streams, whereever you go

and then only gradually as you go on

you make this kind of absolutely necessary contact with people

but I do think that the sort of essense

of self delight as a kind of possible thing

in the modern world and something

that fewer women have than men and want and must have

is the power, the compulsion, not the power

the compulsion to make contact with the world

as you are living in it

and when I'm saying that I don't

simply mean the people next door

I mean what is going on

yes

I am not so sure about the delight

I think it is a very double edged thing

I know

as I suppose I've always known

that I became aware of it in this film

I've never consciously looked at myself in

the mirror and seen myself as I am

I always see the image that I want

I know that I want to

and my children notice it that if I make up

my face I put on a certain expression

if I , from adolescence on, if I have seen myself

naked in the mirror, I have not thought of

myself naked, I have thought of myself as a nude

and I think this comes from having been trolled

around all the major art galleries

in essence, this is culture, this is beauty

with a capital B

and, of course, up to a point from advertising too

but much more from the painting

um, that you think the female body is beautiful

I am a beautiful object, if not, I have to do

something about it

um, and therefore, the painful part

of a narcissistic society is the feeling of inadequacy

this business of always posing in a mirror

I think one does absolutely automatically

and if you actually catch yourself

in a mirror by chance that is not deliberately

because you're getting dressed or having a bath

there's one in the street, or you catch yourself

in a shop window, it's a tremendous shock

because you suddenly see yourself as you are

which is windblown, untidy, badly dressed

tired, and so on

you don't see the person

at all, and I think this is what happens to women

they are always trying to measure

up to this erotic image that is projected.

There are some paintings

and I'm thinking at this moment of one painting

where there is a woman

who is wearing a garment

she is not nude

but it is a garment so loose, so comfortable

so easy, and its my idea, very much

of what a picture of a woman might be like

I think its from a period before yours,

it's so long ago by Lorenzetti

it's a fresco, very very old

and it is a picture of a woman

who is suppossed to represent peace

it's quite extraordinary

she could be one of the liberated

or trying to be liberated young women

of today. she is at ease, she is relaxed

she is not playing the part at all

she is able to combine

pleasure with thought

and with dreaming

and she is, she might spring into action

at any moment

and for me

she has much, much more to do

with nakedness, with oneself, with the

truth of oneself than any other nudes I have seen

[music]