Film Comment Live: Play Me Something

In 1989, John Berger collaborated with Scottish director Timothy Neat to make a film out of “Play Me Something,” his short story first published in The Three Penny Review in 1985, and later included as the final chapter of Berger’s short-story collection, Once in Europa (1987). Set in a small airport on the Scottish island of Barra, where planes land on a tidal beach, Play Me Something draws on Celtic oral tradition and European modernism to tell the beguiling story of a storyteller: a mysterious raconteur played by Berger in a bowler hat. He appears as a motley band of passengers waits for a delayed plane and begins to narrate his tale of an Italian farmer and an urbane young woman who meet at a Communist festival on the Venetian island of Giudecca. As Berger recounts the story, we see it unfold in bits of 16mm color and black-and-white footage, scenes on a television, and still photographs by Jean Mohr. The gaps are filled in by the audience of enraptured passengers—including a young Tilda Swinton and Scottish philosopher Hamish Henderson—so that the nonplace of the airport becomes a site of collective conjuring.

Part of Hold Everything Dear—John Berger and Cinema, a multi-venue Film Comment series celebrating Berger’s centennial.