John Berger is best known for two works published in 1972: G.: A Novel, which won the Booker Prize he shared with the Black Panthers, and the collaborative TV series and book Ways of Seeing. The TV series first aired on 8 January, and a strike by the National Union of Mineworkers began on the following day. Later that year, Berger made a film for the Open University connecting Zola’s novel of nineteenth-century industrial conflict, Germinal, to contemporary struggles. It was broadcast just three times —including during the 1984 miners’ strike in the UK— and has faded into obscurity. It is an urgent work of political montage and criticism, paving the way for works like A Seventh Man, and it deserves better. With his colleague Matthew Harle, Tom Overton is editing The Underground Sea, a volume combining the script of the film with other writings on mines and mineworkers. It will be published by Canongate in time for the 40th anniversary of the 1984 miners’ strike, in a context of changing policies on fossil fuels in light of the climate and ecological emergency. The exploitation Berger described has simply been relocated.
Tom Overton catalogued John Berger’s archive at the British Library and edited two volumes of his writing about art, Portraits and Landscapes. Go Closer, his biography of Berger, will be published in October 2024.
