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‘Sometimes I think in another life we met or did something’: Tilda Swinton and John Berger’s unlikely friendship
Tributes have been pouring out to writer, artist and critic John Berger since the world learned that he had died on Monday, aged 90. Among those grieving will be Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton. The pair enjoyed a kinship that stretched over decades, connected by an appreciation of art and writing but also something more intrinsic – a bond that Swinton referred to as a “twinship”.
Swinton first encountered Berger in her art room at boarding school. Born in 1960, she never saw Ways of Seeing, which aired in the early Seventies, but has since said she will “never forget the frisson of reading his interpretation of Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews as a 'Private: Keep Out!' declaration of property ownership.” She told AnOther Magazine in 2012: “The way in which Berger introduced my generation to the context(s) of art is invaluable, and his influence incalculable.”
The pair wouldn’t meet, however, until 1988. Swinton was at the start of her career: she’d joined the Royal Shakespeare Company four years earlier, and made her film debut, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, in 1986. Berger, meanwhile, was well-established. Just into his sixties, he had been a screen regular for over a decade. Although he had been working on screenplays and cinematic collaborations for nearly as long, the critic was about to make his big screen debut as an actor.
Film producer Colin MacCabe was then head of production at the BFI, and had made his debut as an executive producer on Caravaggio. Tasked with producing Berger and Timothy Neat’s 1989 film, Play Me Something, MacCabe cast Swinton and Berger in the 70-minute-long feature. Art imitated life for Berger, who played an enigmatic stranger who entertained a group of people waiting for a plane on the Scottish Isle of Barra. Swinton, cast as a hairdresser, was among them.
The pair realised that they shared a birthday: 5 November. While Berger was born in 1926, and Swinton 34 years later, it held great significance for both. As Swinton explained to The Independent in February: “[it] formed a bedrock to our complicity, the practical fantasy of twinship”. They also bonded over the experience of being raised by military men who had swallowed the violence they had endured – Berger’s father was awarded the Military Cross for his efforts on the Western Front during the First World War, while Major General Swinton was wounded twice during the Second World War.
Swinton became one of a number of creatives that Berger would collaborate with during his life and career. She was involved with artist Isabel Coixet’s tribute to Berger, From I to J, in April 2010. Coixet’s art installation was inspired by Berger’s 2008 novel, From a to x, that saw actresses including Penelope Cruz, Julie Delpy and Monica Bellucci reading letters from the novel. Swinton, Coixet recalled, “was thrilled to do it”. Coixet had the British actress read a letter about soldiers dying at war, reflecting Swinton and Berger’s military connections.
Swinton took the role of reader a step further in the summer of 2011, when she stepped in for Berger during the promotional tour of Bento’s Sketchbook, his collection of essays and drawings inspired by 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Berger, then 85, did not want to appear on stage and answer questions about his book, arguing that anything people might want to know about the book could be found inside its covers. Instead, he and Swinton would decide on the best passages to read from Bento’s Sketchbook, and recite those to the audience instead.
Art historian Laurie Taylor was chairing the reading, and wrote about Swinton and Berger’s collaboration at the time:
They greeted each other like long-lost relations. Two fellow artistic spirits in a room otherwise dedicated to the necessary but still slightly sordid commercial business of selling books. Indeed, their embrace went on for so long that I was beginning to think I might need to physically tear them apart if I wanted to establish the passages Tilda would read before we were all ushered on to the stage.
A similarly vigorous hug can be spotted in Swinton and Berger’s final collaboration: Harvest, one of four films grouped together as Seasons in Quincy, a cinematic portrait of Berger conceived by Swinton and MacCabe that mirrored how film first brought the trio together.
Berger had been living in Quincy, an idyllic, mist-soaked rural community in the French Alps, since the mid-Seventies, ostensibly to immerse himself in sustainable farming. He was now nearly 90. Swinton wanted to capture her friendship with Berger: “I wanted a glimpse of his gimlet eye and a blast of his company. I went to find him in Quincy for a check-in, for a catch-up, for a chinwag.”
But when she and MacCabe arrived at his home on the back of a snowdrift, mere hours before the authorities shut the roads, Swinton declared that there shouldn’t be one film, but four, to reflect each season.
MacCabe directed A Song for Politics, the third film, as well as Ways of Listening, which follows Berger and Swinton, trapped in his kitchen in mid-winter, as they discuss their fathers and shared memories. Christopher Roth depicted Spring. Swinton directed the final film, Harvest, in which her teenage children descend on Berger’s home, learn to ride his motorbike and make candles.
Berger had one rule throughout the project: he would not talk about his own life. Instead, the films are bookended by a charming depiction of Swinton and Berger’s friendship: we see him descend his front steps to grasp her in his arms. Later, they discuss their connection while he draws her portrait, “Sometimes I think it’s as though, in another life, we met or did something,” we hear Berger say. “Maybe we made another appointment to see each other again, in this life,” he continues. “The fifth of November. But it wasn’t the same year. That didn’t matter. We weren’t in that kind of time.”
“We got off at the same station,” Swinton replies.
“Exactly.”