Teodor Shanin

“Pig Earth” marked John Berger’s first return to television after “Ways of Seeing”. The film, boldly using mostly still photographs, is based on John’s book of the same name, which was both a work of fiction as well as a history of French Peasant experience, as told by John ‘the story teller’, as if in the peasant’s own voices. All of which was given brilliant visual expression in the film through a series of beautifully edited sequences, each constructed from vivid and moving photographs of peasants and their lives, in black and white and colour, by John’s friend and long-time collaborator, the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr.