I wrote The Blinding Light to try to understand the mental and spiritual crisis that August Strindberg suffered in February 1896. Deeply disturbed, plagued by hallucinations, he holed up in various hotel rooms in Paris, most famously in the Hotel Orfila in the Rue d’Assas.

In Jean Grémillon's final fiction film The Love of a Woman, Marie Prieur (Micheline Presle) arrives on the Breton island of Ushant to replace the tiny settlement's aging Dr Morel (Robert Naly). While showing Marie her new digs and surgery, Mme Morel (Madeleine Geoffroy) compliments the lady doctor on her youth. Marie sighingly replies that she is 28. Quel horreur!

There are three bravura scenes in Ronin that merit the price of acquisition. Two of them are French car chases, one along the twisting alleys of Nice, the other through the tunnels and up the wrong side of the carriageway in Paris.

The two haunting series of crime novels by Fred Vargas, the writing pseudonym of a French archaeologist and historian, have acquired a worldwide following: quirky, idiosyncratic, eccentric and beautifully written, they are highly individual and, for some perhaps, an acquired taste. But once hooked, you cannot help but follow through.

A 19th-century silver and wood pot in which to make chocolate, pertly graceful; 17th-century blue and white Delftware; a Chinese calligraphy panel; a 19th-century carved wooden god from the Ivory Coast; a bronze and gold earth goddess from South-East Asia. These are but a tiny sampling from the multitude of objects with which Matisse surrounded himself in his studio(s).

Now in its 35 year, Womad is embedded into British festival culture, flying the flags of a musical multiculturalism that is about breaking down barriers and building new relationships. It’s not something you want to lose.

For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double biopic is Emile Zola. Danièle Thompson’s film tells the story of the friendship between the eminent realist writer and the genius of Post-Impressionism – to whom acclaim came only late in life – that lasted, despite their differences, for almost half a century.

They first encountered one another as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, when their circumstances could hardly have been more different: Zola was the son of an Italian engineer whose early death left his family impoverished, Cézanne the rebellious scion of an affluent banking family. The early scenes of their childhood friendship are some of the best in the film, nicely spontaneous and natural. They certainly glory in their exploration of the Provence landscapes to which Thompson returns repeatedly, not least when we witness Cézanne creating his Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings in situ.

Thompson’s film is a medium-level entry to the tradition of French cinema about artistic heritage 

But this script dives around across the decades, often rather confusingly. It opens in 1888, with Cézanne, after a period of separation, visiting the now acclaimed and prosperous Zola at his home north of Paris. They certainly had grounds for difference: Zola had married Cézanne’s erstwhile model and mistress, Alexandrine (a nicely understated performance from Alice Pol). But their immediate bone of contention was Zola’s 1886 novel L’Oeuvre (often translated as His Masterpiece), with its main character, a promising but frustrated painter, in whom Cézanne saw a painfully recognisable portrayal of himself.  

The accusations fly freely. “You don’t read my books any more, you judge them,” Zola tells Cézanne, to which the artist snaps back, “You’ve befriended the bourgeoisie you hated.” Between this beginning and end, there are some persuasive (and certainly culturally name-dropping) scenes of artistic fraternité. Cézanne’s first visit to Zola in Paris involves a prolonged encounter that assembles most of the great Impressionists – Manet, Renoir and Camille Pissaro, just for starters – around the same bistro table.

We see the controversies around the Academy salons that sometimes ended in fights, though appreciating some century and a half later quite what such differences meant is sometimes challenging. More beguiling are visual recreations of some of the great works of Impressionism, notably Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, even if it can feel like an art-historical roll-call: you hear someone hailed as “Berthe”, you know it must be Morrisot. The travails of Cézanne’s creation, including his propensity to destroy his canvases, is there too, in as much as any film can convincingly convey the process of painting. There’s a painful moment when Cézanne, funded in his Paris atelier by Zola, learns that one of his works has actually sold – but only its central detail, an apple, cut out of the canvas on the whim of a client.

Thompson’s film is a medium-level entry to the tradition of French cinema about artistic heritage. Guillaume Canet plays Zola rather drily, with Guillaume Gallienne, billed as a member of the Comédie-Française – as if the augustness of this project culturel was not otherwise guaranteed – as Cézanne. Full plaudits to the film’s make-up artists, who endow both with impressive varieties and combinations of facial hair. Jean-Marie Dreujou’s cinematography is much more satisfying than an overwrought score from Eric Neveux. Like that apple excised from its pictorial context, Cézanne et moi is more satisfying in its parts than in its entirety.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cézanne et moi

All the accolades heaped onto this documentary in the near 50 years since it was made are wholly deserved. Over 251 minutes, Marcel Ophuls weaves together an extraordinary collection of interviews and archive to tell the story of France during the German occupation from 1940-1944.

Falla: Nights in the Garden of Spain, Ravel: Piano Concertos Steven Osborne (piano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ludovic Morlot (Hyperion)

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” I’ve quoted these words by John Berger many, many times. They are in my bloodstream, as it were, since they provided me with an explanation for my experience as a young woman in the world. 

The 1972 television series and accompanying book Ways of Seeing from which they came also changed the way people looked at and thought about art. The clarity and conviction of Berger’s observations about how we see and read images cut through the obfuscating waffle which, until then, had passed for art criticism. He made it clear that images are, first and foremost, a means of communication and, as such, they have political and social content as well as aesthetic merit.

Sadly Berger died last January aged 91. The Seasons in Quincy is an affectionate portrait of the man, his ideas and his life in Quincy, the village in the French Haute-Savoie to which he moved in the mid 1970s with his third wife, Beverly. Made by different directors while Berger was still alive, the four films look at various aspects of his life. For anyone wanting a conventional documentary, they will be a frustrating experience; but then it would be hard to do justice to a man whose prolific writings encompass a wide range of topics. He described himself as a revolutionary story-teller; when awarded the Booker Prize in 1972 he donated half the prize money to the Black Panther Party in Britain. As well as books on Picasso, Spinoza, documentary photography, the Russian emigré Ernst Neizvestny and artists working in the Soviet Union, Berger also wrote novels, short stories, poems and social commentary. His book A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975), for instance, was informed by his experience of living and working among peasants in the Haute-Savoie. And he broached the subject again in the 1980s trilogy Into Their Labours, this time in novel form.

Tilda Swinton describes her opening film as “A photograph of a meeting between friends”. She and Berger were both born on 5 November, 34 years apart; this created, says Swinton, “an indissoluble bond of kinship” between them. She visits Berger the week before Christmas for “a catch-up”. 

Watching her slice apples for a crumble triggers childhood memories in him of his father, who served on the Western Front in World War One and was awarded the Military Cross, but never spoke of his wartime experiences. It's another thing the pair have in common; despite losing a leg in World War Two, Swinton’s father never mentioned his disability. The decision to keep silent and not hand on experiences from which one’s children might learn prompted Berger to write, “History cannot have its tongue cut out.”

Swinton ends the film with her recipe for apple crumble, which includes the lines: “an apron of apples preferably from one’s own tree, a horse’s cheek of oats, at least one sound finger and thumb for crumbling, a brave amount of ground ginger, an élan of lemon juice, appetite, good company”. Depending on one’s state of mind, the film is either disarmingly intimate or annoyingly self-regarding.

“We came to Quincy to talk to John Berger about uprisings ... the Prague Spring, the Arab Spring and the perpetual false spring of capital,” says Christopher Roth at the beginning of his film Spring. On arrival, though, he discovered that “a private winter had established itself in the household with the death of Beverly”. Switching to plan B, he made a film about animals and our interactions with them.Berger’s presence is established through excerpts from Once Upon a Time, a film made by Mike Dibb in 1983 and extracts from books like Why Look at Animals? and Pig Earth, in which Berger discusses our often conflicted relationship with animals. Footage of zoo and farm animals and an interview with a peasant farmer in Haute Savoie links Berger’s ideas with the present. It is a good film about an important subject, but after the opening statement, it inevitably feels like a stand-in for the main event.

Of the four films, A Song for Politics by Bartek Dziadosz and Colin MacCabe is the nearest thing to a documentary. “All the important decisions which determine the use, exploitation and organisation of the planet and its resources are now taken by financial speculators”, says Berger in a panel discussion about the decline of capitalism and the role of the writer in a world where readers are bombarded by information. This is intercut with snippets from Berger’s many television appearances in the 1960s and ’70s and ends with his affectionate account of arriving in the Haute Savoie. The film cannot hope to be all-encompassing, but it conveys the essence of Berger’s ideas in an extremely engaging and intelligent way. 

Continuity is the theme of Harvest by Tilda Swinton. Berger stays with her in Paris, while her children Honor and Xavier travel to Quincy to visit Berger’s son Yves who was born in the village. This euphoric look at his life involves making prints, dipping candles, keeping bees and harvesting raspberries from the canes planted by Beverly, which at John’s request they eat while thinking of her. 

• The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger is in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from 23 June
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Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Seasons in Quincy