He felt like a stranger in his own country. But internationally, Tanner has long been considered the best-known Swiss filmmaker. Works such as “La salamandre” or “Charles mort ou vif” survive him, who has now died at the age of 93.
Alain Tanner at home in Geneva, 2004.
In the beginning, his characters suffered from Switzerland with wit and optimism. But then increasingly grumpy, annoyed by all the capitalist misery. Nevertheless, Alain Tanner from Geneva left an oeuvre of great importance for Swiss film. He has now died at the age of 93.
Tanner, Soutter, Goretta. That was the Holy Trinity of Swiss film for years (Michel Soutter, the younger of the two colleagues of the same age by a few years, died in 1991 and was followed by Claude Goretta in 2019). The three were also the illustrious names within Groupe 5, a community of Geneva directors formed in 1968. Between 1969 and 1973 they made eight films in quick succession, which not only electrified Swiss cinephile audiences, but also and especially in Paris generated attention.
gesture of refusal
It was Alain Tanner who started things off in 1969 with “Charles mort ou vif”. This «petite fresque historique» opened up new areas for the figure of the nonconformist in the person of the protagonist. Because the “dropout” is an entrepreneur, owner of a small watch factory. His son, who runs the business, asks Charles Dée why he wore glasses when he doesn’t need them, and receives one of the answers that enraptured young intellectuals in Switzerland at the time: “So that I can see less clearly.” The scene at the lunch table is still funny today, when the news casually announces the acceptance of women’s suffrage in Switzerland (which was to become a fact two years later, in 1971).
Documentary Beginnings
Born in Geneva on December 6, 1929, Alain Tanner had both obtained a Diplôme de l’Administration maritime at the university and founded the film club there together with Claude Goretta. In 1955 the two moved to London, where they made Nice Time in 1957, their twenty-minute documentary debut about the atmosphere in Piccadilly Circus at night, which won an award in Venice that same year.
After being introduced to the profession at the BBC, Tanner made dozens of short reports for French-speaking Switzerland television over the course of the 1960s, first in Paris and then back in Geneva d’un poète” (1961), “Les Apprentis” (1964) or “Une ville à Chandigarh” (1966). In 1962 he was one of the founding members of the Association of Swiss Filmmakers.
Tanner’s fame established the first five years of his feature film work; the first ten – up to 1979, the year of “Messidor” – broadened and consolidated the image to which he was ultimately committed. Everything that came after that in the form of feature films, at least a full dozen, offered only the spectacle of the strangeness and helplessness of an artist, despite successful individual moments, which was particularly evident in the remakes of his own material.
stranger in their own country
But hadn’t Alain Tanner always been a stranger in this country? “Messidor” begins ostentatiously with “Gute Nacht” from Schubert’s “Winterreise”: “I moved in as a stranger / I move out again as a stranger.” He has no roots, “pas de véritable identité”, wrote Tanner in his “Ciné-mélanges” (2007). Although his parents lived in Geneva, they hardly knew where Switzerland was located. In that sense he was an orphan, dumped on the border somewhere between Switzerland and France. “No Man’s Land” (1985) describes such a non-place frequented by a few homeless people; in a somewhat varied form, now expanded to include the autobiographical aspect of the director, who has lost the themes, «La Vallée fantôme» (1987) takes up the subject again.
Farewell to Switzerland
The excitement was great when Alain Tanner announced in 1980 that he wanted to shoot a film outside of Switzerland with «Light Years Away». So had Switzerland now had its day as a topic, did she have nothing more to say to him – and therefore he to her? As it turned out, the 1980s did indeed mark the transition to the international, often random, sometimes irrelevant. Switzerland did make an appearance again, then in a tendentious distortion like «La femme de Rose Hill» (1989), the story of the beautiful foreigner in a foreign country – the distorted echo of «Le Milieu du Moons» (1974). Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes in 1981, «Les Annèes lumiére» was both a parable of the failure of high-flying dreams and a rather one-dimensional critique of civilization, set in a remote corner of Ireland.
escape into sex
In “Dans la Ville Blanche” (1982) it was a lyrically tuned mechanic, embodied by Bruno Ganz, who began to pay homage to the beauty of women and the city after he had left his freighter in Lisbon. All fussiness was then swept away with “Une flamme dans mon cœur” (1987) with and based on a story by Myriam Mézières. Tanner had first worked with the French actress in «Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000» (1976), where it was not by chance – but through the screenplay and Tanner’s doubts at the time that sexuality could be found in the «as if» of the non-pornographic film – when the Vestal Virgin of Tantra appeared. Now the director and co-author animated themselves to evoke (their) amour fou between Paris and Cairo in a way Swiss film had never seen in such unreserved self-exposure.
The fact that Tanner, who had shot exclusively in color since his fourth feature film, once again went back to black and white here proved to be a fortunate stylistic device against any superficial voyeurism. Myriam Mézières was again the screenwriter and leading actress in the similarly conceived but more multi-layered “Le journal de Lady M” (1993), while Tanner even let her co-direct in the highly dramatic “Fleurs de sang” (2002). But after that, at least the now over seventy-year-old seemed exhausted. He was to make another film, «Paul s’en va» (2003), a pitiful swan song, a manifesto of a defiantly asserted analytical view of late capitalism and consumer society, and yet above all testimony to an artist’s loss of reality.
Fatal rejection of the script
In connection with “Une flamme dans mon cœur”, Alain Tanner said that he was “not interested at all” in the screenplay. This also refers back to the end of the collaboration with John Berger. While “Charles mort ou vif” caused a sensation primarily in Switzerland, the second installment, “La Salamandre”, attracted attention beyond Paris in London and New York. This undoubtedly had something to do with the Bergers name. The collaboration should also include “Le Milieu du Monde” and “Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000”.
For the intervening ingenious chamber play “Le retour d’Afrique” Berger had provided the idea of the lack of departure; It was typical of Tanner and applauded by the zeitgeist that the young couple ended up fathering “a traitor to the country”. If Tanner was still regarded as the best-known Swiss filmmaker internationally, i.e. in the Anglo-Saxon world, this was clearly thanks to the work he realized together with John Berger. Berger not only provided impeccable, witty screenplays, but also that joke, also scenically, that had disappeared with his departure from Tanner’s work.
A crucial decade
An artistic method had reached its climax and had come to an end. The tragedy of Alain Tanner’s life was that he never found comparable expression for the vast majority of his artistic work. But Swiss film will have reason to commemorate a decisive decade for a long time to come, in which it received so much ideal impetus and artistic inspiration from no other. – “Paul s’en va” was the saying in the cinematic farewell, which featured Tanner’s alter ego in the title. Now there is no longer any doubt: Paul s’en est allé.