This special 50th anniversary screening will be introduced by Gareth Evans.

This Thursday (5th November) marks what would have been John Berger’s 100th birthday. One of the most loved and influential writers – across all forms – of the post-war period, Berger, who died aged 90 in 2017, is most well known for the TV series and book Ways of Seeing. It was, however, just one of 60 books he wrote, across six decades, in a dazzling and mould-breaking body of work. He was also a prolific television broadcaster and wrote three features with the late Swiss director Alain Tanner, of which Jonah… is the greatest, a masterpiece of humane enquiry into how to live and make meaning collectively within a ruthless social and economic order. It has never felt more relevant than it does now.

It follows a disparate group of nonconformists and radicals (whose names each begin with M) from Geneva who gather at a rural retreat to reflect on the aftermath of May 1968 and what the future might hold in the wake of those cultural uprisings. Witty, sensual, moving and prescient, it is “intelligent without being cerebral, political without being dogmatic, cloaking its epic view of history in a wealth of burlesque domestic details, Jonah… is perhaps the most unpretentiously accomplished film yet to describe the revolutionary cultural changes and conservative economic forces that convergently define Western man’s social possibilities.” (Jan Dawson, Monthly Film Bulletin). Meanwhile, Pauline Kael in The New Yorker wrote that “the whole film is designed as a collection of little routines. Jonah.. is so ingeniously constructed that one can enjoy it the way one enjoyed Renoir’s egalitarian films of the 1930s, relating to each character in turn.”

It is showing now as part of nationwide celebrations of Berger’s centenary. Further information on other events across London and beyond can be found here.

Thanks to Tom Roeloffs and Jupiter Films.

Cast:
Roger Jendly, Myriam Boyer, Jean-Luc Bideau, Miou-Miou