Went to see John Berger in conversation with Geoff Dyer last night at the NFT in what turned out to be a very memorable evening.

This was followed by the film ‘Play Me Something’ which Berger wrote and acted in. He plays a character who arrives in the Island of Barra, and joins a small group of people waiting for a plane to the mainland. While they wait, he narrates a story of two people meeting at the Unita Communist Festival in Venice.

The people who wait in the airport join in at strategic moments with their own small tales, jokes, songs and observations. The filming and the story are poetic and rich in visual and aural images. Berger’s story telling is hypnotic and powerful. The film shows the features of the characters on the island in detail, allowing the camera to dwell on faces, expressions and nuances. It intercuts this intimate human experience with giant ships moving past Venice towed by industrial strength tugs. We see the giant cranes of the docks and the dock workers coming off shift en masse, playing cards, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes. People discuss Antonio Gramsci and sing Bandero Rossa; people meet and fall in love, discussing endless possibilities about the future.

One of the people who appears in the film is Hamish Henderson, a native of the island. After the film, Timothy Neat, the Director gave a few ancedotes about making it. Hamish Henderson had served as a special agent ‘behind enemy lines’ working with the Italian partisans in Northern Italy in 1944, a bloody and brutal period. After the war he was actively involved in the peace and socialist movement. During the making of the film, he produced a notebook he had kept in 1944. He had no idea at that time that he would survive the war, or ever act in a film. In the notebook he wrote ‘ I hope that one day we can build a civilisation that has both the Island of Barra and Venice in it’.

I liked this as an possibility for virtual space. Instead of one in which a very commercial sameness and monotony dominates, one in which the differences illustrated by geographically and socially different places such as Barra and Venice can co-operate and co-exist; each adding a different dimension to a shared experience.