Tracking down John Berger quote Hi all, I'm interested in…
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Tracking down John Berger quote
Hi all, I'm interested in writing something about Dadaism and I found this really interesting anecdote attributed to John Berger in *The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology*, specifically in the foreword by Jack Flam.
>In May of 1917, only a year after the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire group, Satie and Cocteau’s absurdist ballet Parade was staged at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. Just a month before that, as John Berger has pointed out, the French had opened their offensive against the Hindenburg line, only 150 miles away from Paris. An estimated 120,000 French soldiers were killed during that brief offensive (although the statistics were long kept secret), and a serious mutiny ensued. One of the most striking events of that dark time was the procession of a group of infantry — men through a town, baa-ing like sheep, to protest that they were like lambs being led to the slaughter.
It's such a compelling story and one that you'd think would be more widely circulated! However, I can't find a primary source on it. It's not in the citations in the anthology and I've tried searching a bunch of different keywords to no avail, and I've had no luck with ChatGPT either. Any chance anyone knows where this is from? Or was Flam just lucky enough to attend a lecture that I'll never find a transcript of?
#entertainment
Hi all, I'm interested in writing something about Dadaism and I found this really interesting anecdote attributed to John Berger in *The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology*, specifically in the foreword by Jack Flam.
>In May of 1917, only a year after the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire group, Satie and Cocteau’s absurdist ballet Parade was staged at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. Just a month before that, as John Berger has pointed out, the French had opened their offensive against the Hindenburg line, only 150 miles away from Paris. An estimated 120,000 French soldiers were killed during that brief offensive (although the statistics were long kept secret), and a serious mutiny ensued. One of the most striking events of that dark time was the procession of a group of infantry — men through a town, baa-ing like sheep, to protest that they were like lambs being led to the slaughter.
It's such a compelling story and one that you'd think would be more widely circulated! However, I can't find a primary source on it. It's not in the citations in the anthology and I've tried searching a bunch of different keywords to no avail, and I've had no luck with ChatGPT either. Any chance anyone knows where this is from? Or was Flam just lucky enough to attend a lecture that I'll never find a transcript of?
#entertainment
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