Review: Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry

A documentary can be the trickiest of visual things to pull-off. It can be especially tricky if your subject is niche, something that perhaps not everyone is familiar with.

Going into Look & See I had never heard of Wendell Berry. I was tempted to look him up but decided against it. Arguing that, as a documentary titled ‘a portrait of’, surely it will tell me all I need.

I mention this as the title of director Laura Dunn’s (Green, The Unforseen) film is a little misleading. After finishing the documentary, I’m not convinced I’m much the wiser about Wendell Berry, but that’s not the whole story.

What Dunn has created is a beautiful ode to the land we live on, the land we live off, the land we abuse and take for granted, the land we’re losing.

Read the complete review at Operation Condor.

Brief NYT review of "Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry"

Wendell Berry is difficult to classify. “Some people would think he’s a novelist and some think he’s an essayist and some think he’s a poet — and it kind of drifts off into nothing in particular,” his wife, Tanya Berry, says with a laugh toward the end of “Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry.” Laura Dunn’s documentary is not simply a biography but an attempt to show how Mr. Berry sees the world.

Judging from his sonorous voice, he may have missed his calling in radio. Throughout “Look & See,” Mr. Berry is an almost spectral presence, heard in narration and seen in archival footage. Mr. Berry has been compared to Henry David Thoreau. A longtime resident of Port Royal, Ky., he writes about the environment and the lifestyle of farmers with a naturalist’s curiosity and a poet’s gift for description.

Read the whole review by Ben Kenigsberg at The New York Times.

Another critical response to "Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry"

“The limits of a camera is that it’s always looking through a frame,” the poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry says in Look & See, a documentary about the man in which the man imposes his own limits on the camera, refusing to let himself be photographed. He continues, his voice a rumpled American marvel: “There’s certain things that you can’t show that living eyes can see. To determine where to set that lens, where it’s going to look from, requires imagination.” Laura Dunn, the film’s director, accepts this as a challenge. Look & See will, like Berry’s vigorous agrarian verse, look and see, through the rousing Kentucky farm and landscape studies of director of photography Lee Daniel, and through James Baker Hall’s still photographs of the writer and his family in years past.

Read the full article by Alan Scherstuhl at The Village Voice.

A critical review of "Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry"

Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry has a bit of a misleading title. While the documentary frames its discussion through the author’s philosophical lens, the focus is actually on the struggles of small farmers to stay afloat in an age of industrial agricultural. Even this description might lead one to think Look & See works as a straightforward piece of long-form journalism, an investigation that turns up answers, but that would be a mistake. This is a film about feelings and philosophy, about a moral and spiritual shift Mr. Berry has seen in American culture over the last fifty years. Rather than encourage discussion or provide a nuanced picture for viewers to puzzle over after the credits roll, this approach quickly settles into subdued pontificating, eschewing enlightenment for preaching.

Read the whole article by Jacquelin Hipes at Red Carpet Crash.

 

A conversation with Laura Dunn, director of Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry

Sean Malin: Wendell’s performance in the film of his own poem, as well as his narration for The Unforeseen, reflect how learned and clever this writer is. He has this mythology, as you and I have discussed before, that has turned him into a mythic figure. Whether this is just my own projection or a full-blown misunderstanding, it feels to me that his refusal to appear in the film physically is a perpetuation of his personal mythology. What is the mask that he wears with you when narrating for your films?

Laura Dunn: He just does not like film, Sean.

SM: Is that really it? He just says, “That’s not for me.”

LD: Yes. There are a couple of things he’s said real clearly to me. I’ve mentioned this in other interviews, but he believes that the pervasiveness of the screen – film, TV, computer – has contributed to the decline of literacy. He thinks that when you have a picture, your mind doesn’t have to do the work of imagining. When you just have words, your mind has to be activated and you imagine the place, as opposed to just seeing it, which provokes a laziness of the mind. I think he’s got a real point.

SM: Sure, but does that make him scornful of you as a filmmaker? I resent the concept of cinema as a non-literate art. It takes a very learned person to “read” a film completely.

LD: No, he’s not. I agree, of course – it’s your medium and mine – but you are someone who watches films and really analyzes them and really thinks about them. Most people aren’t. Most people are addicted to the medium and want immediate gratification. The pervasiveness of screens is on a continuum with so much of the decline of our culture, in my opinion. People are inside looking at televisions rather than sitting on their front porches visiting with each other.

We’re also talking about someone who is 82, you know? He is not on Twitter, he’s not on social media, he’s not even using a computer. His perspective on the screen is influenced largely by the role that television has played in the changing of community and the backyard. On top of the screen as a problem, Wendell also talked a lot about the problems of idolatry. We live in a time where people want to make idols of individuals. He feels really strongly that he is simply a function of the people that he’s around: his neighbors, and his membership in his community, are primary to his identity and to his values. Living in a little tiny rural community in Kentucky, yet being quite famous, makes it hard for him to just be a neighbor. I think he’s trying to preserve his privacy and his values so that he can simply be another member of his community.

Read the whole conversation at Cinemalin: Film Commentary and Criticism.

A brief review of Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry

LOOK & SEE: A PORTRAIT OF WENDELL BERRY is a tough nut to sell. Far from being a bad film , it's pacing and low key way of doing things is going to cause some people to nod off. On the other hand the films magnificent marriage of words and image will delight many others, especially those who see this on the big screen.

Berry was a well known writer who in 1965 took family away from the big city to live in rural Kentucky. He found success in writing about the land and life he loved turning ot novels, stories, gardening books, poems, essays and pieces championing environmentalism. The film is full of friends and relatives speaking about the man and his work, as well as the man himself reading his words.

Read the whole review by Steve Kopian at Unseen Films.

 

A podcast interview with Wendell Berry filmmaker Laura Dunn

Look & See is not a romanticized version of the farmer poet, but an invitation to see the hardship, character, struggle, neighborliness and rooted love that makes up the agrarian lifestyle in Henry County, Kentucky. Laura Dunn and her crew made a generous film. I say generous because Look & See freely gave me space to ask the beautiful question – how then shall I live?

Laura and I talk about Wendell and Tanya Berry’s impact on her life, Wendell’s idea of the union of life and art, marriage as a creative partnership, the unspoken farm crisis and its implications for young farmers today, where she finds hope from the Wendell and Tanya Berry and in her community and why are there so many comedians listed in the end credits of Look & See.

Find and Listen to the interview by Paul Swanson at Contemplify.

On U. S. theatrical premier of "Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry"

Next Friday (June 30) a film featuring the work of Kentucky’s own Wendell Berry will enjoy its U.S. theatrical premiere at the IFC Center in New York City. “Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry” is a cinematic account of the changing landscapes and shifting values of rural America in the era of industrial agriculture, as seen through the mind’s eye of writer, farmer and activist Wendell Berry, an alumnus and former faculty member of the University of Kentucky Department of English.

The first documentary about Berry, one of America’s most significant living writers, “Look and See” was filmed in and around Henry County, Kentucky — where Berry has lived and farmed since the mid-1960s. Filmmaker Laura Dunn weaves Berry’s poetic and prescient words with striking cinematography and the testimonies of his wife Tanya Berry; his daughter Mary Berry, a UK alumna and executive director of The Berry Center; and neighbors, all of whom are being deeply affected by the industrial and economic changes to their agrarian way of life.

Read the complete article by Whitney Hale at University of Kentucky News.

Wendell Berry on "The Bad Modern History of Farming"

To make the economies of the land and of land use something like sustainable, we would have to begin with attention to the difference between the industrial economy of inert materials and monetary abstractions and an authentic land economy that must include the kindly husbanding of living creatures. This is the critical issue. 

If farming is no more than an industry to be unendingly transformed by technologies, then farmers can be replaced by engineers, and engineers finally by robots, in the progress toward our evident goal of human uselessness. If, on the contrary, because of the uniqueness and fragility of each one of the world’s myriad of small places, the land economies must involve a creaturely affection and care, then we must look back three or four generations and think again.

From its beginning, industrialism has depended on its own, and on most people’s, willingness to ignore everything that does not serve the cheapest possible production of merchandise and, therefore, the highest possible profit. And so to look back and think again, we must acknowledge real needs that have continued through the years to be unacknowledged: the need to see and respect the inescapable dependence even of our present economy, as of our lives, upon nature and the natural world; and upon the need, just as important, to see and respect our inescapable dependence upon the economies—of farming, ranching, forestry, fishing, and mining—by which the goods of nature are made serviceable to human good.

Read the complete essay at The Progressive.

On the Recent Wendell Berry Collection and Conversation

Wendell Berry, an avid environmentalist himself, is not opposed stirring the pot. He just released a book of essays optimistically titled The World-Ending Fire and is the subject of a documentary produced by Nick Offerman — yep, that Nick Offerman — called Look and See, neither of which pull any punches. But any idealistic or rhetorical blow proffered aside, Berry isn’t one to engage eagerly without putting serious thought into solutions first. Something I have been noticing over the last few years of his work, interviews, and lectures is that he seems to be in a sifting, distilling season of his life. Now in his 80s, Berry seems to be even more thoughtful (if that is possible), listening closer, speaking clearly yet humbly. We also do the same with him, increasingly mindful of the shortness of days.

Read the compete article by Josh Retterer at Mockingbird.