Guest Lecture
ONA Fokushalle and Online
Urbanism and the Countryside

The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John BergerFilm screening with director Christopher Roth, followed by a conversation with Klearjos Papanicolaou, Susanne Hefti, and Teresa Galí-Izard

The Seasons in Quincy is the result of a five-year project that gives a portrait of the intellectual and storyteller John Berger. In 1973, Berger abandoned the metropolis to live in the tiny Alpine village of Quincy. The four-part film examines different aspects of his life in this remote village while also combining ideas and motifs from the writer’s own work. Each film was created as an individual work of art but in the end combine to make this feature film. In this session, we welcome Christopher Roth, the director of “Spring,” the part that contextualises Berger’s seminal writing on animals in the local farming culture.

Christopher Roth is a film director, artist, and television producer. In the summer of 2022, So Long Daddy. See You in Hell will be launched. A fictional feature film he made with Jeanne Tremsal about her youth in a commune in the 1980s. Jana McKinnon and Clemens Schick play the lead roles. Roth was one of the curators of the German Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, looking back from the year 2038 at how we barely managed to get a grip on the big problems. Over 4 hours of film have emerged from the New Serenity period. In 2018, Roth co-launched space-time.tv a cooperative television platform with now 4 channels. The same year marked the premiere of Architecting after Politics, the third film with architects Brandlhuber+ after The Property Drama (Chicago Biennale 2017) and its predecessor Legislating Architecture (Venice Biennale 2016). Roth made Hyperstition with Armen Avanessian and The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger with Colin McCabe and Tilda Swinton (Berlinale, 2016). Roth’s film Baader was awarded the Silver Bear for “New Perspectives in Cinema” at the 2002 Berlinale. Christopher Roth shows at Esther Schipper Gallery.