The BEST episodes of Ways of Seeing season 1
Every episode of Ways of Seeing season 1, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Ways of Seeing season 1!
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.
#1 - Commercial Art
Season 1 - Episode 4 - Aired 1/29/1972
In the fourth programme, on publicity and advertising, Berger argues that colour photography has taken over the role of oil paint, though the context is reversed. An idealised potential for the viewer (via consumption) is considered a substitution for the actual reality depicted in old master portraits.
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#2 - Women in Art
Season 1 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/15/1972
The second film discusses the female nude. Berger asserts that only twenty or thirty old masters depict a woman as herself rather than as a subject of male idealisation or desire.
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#3 - Collectors and Collecting
Season 1 - Episode 3 - Aired 1/22/1972
The third programme is on the use of oil paint as a means of depicting or reflecting the status of the individuals who commissioned the work of art.
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#4 - Psychological Aspects
Season 1 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/8/1972
The first part of the television series draws on ideas from Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction arguing that through reproduction an Old Master's painting's modern context is severed from that which existed at the time of its making.
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