Alain Tanner Films | Alain Tanner Filmography | Alain Tanner Biography | Alain Tanner Career | Alain Tanner Awards

Alain Tanner's involvement with film began during his college years. While attending Geneva's Calvin College, he and Claude Goretta formed Geneva's first film society. It was during this time that Tanner developed an admiration for the ethnographic documentaries of Jean Rouch and fellow Swiss Henry Brandt, an influence that continued throughout his career. After a brief stint with the Swiss merchant marine, Tanner spent a year in London as an apprentice at the BFI, where, with Goretta, he completed an experimental documentary, Nice Time, which chronicled the night life of Piccadilly Circus. While in London he participated in the Free Cinema Movement, along with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lindsay Anderson. Through Anderson, Tanner made the acquaintance of novelist and art critic John Berger, who would later write the scenarios for Le Salamandre, Middle of the World, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and Le Retour d'Afrique.

Upon returning to Switzerland in 1960, Tanner completed some forty documentaries for television. Among these were: Les Apprentis, which concerned the lives of teenagers (and created using the methods of Rouch's direct cinema); Une Ville ? Chandigarh, on the architecture designed by Le Corbusier for the Punjab capital (the narration for this film was assembled by John Berger); and newsreel coverage of the events of May 1968 in Paris. This last project provided the ammunition for Tanner (once again with Goretta) to form Groupe 5, a collective of Swiss filmmakers. They proposed an idea to Swiss TV for the funding of full-length narrative features to be shot in 16-millimeter and then blown-up to 35-millimeter for release. The plan enabled Tanner to make his first feature, Charles, Dead or Alive, which won first prize at Locarno in 1969.

The film tells of a middle-aged industrialist who, on the eve of receiving an award as the foremost business personality of the year, discovers his disaffection for the institution-laden society in which he finds himself. Following an innate sense of anarchism that Tanner posits as universal, he attempts to reject this lifestyle. His retreat into madness is blocked by his family and friends, who compel him, by appealing to his sense of duty, to resume his responsibilities.

All Tanner's films follow a similar scenario: individuals or a group become alienated from society; rejecting it, they try to forge a new society answerable to themselves alone, only to be defeated by the relentless pressures of traditional society's institutions, whose commerce they never cease to require. This theme receives its fullest and most moving expression in Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. Here the failure of the collective and the survivors of 1968, who come together at Marguerite's farm outside Geneva, is not viewed as a defeat so much as one generation's attempt to keep the hope of radical social change alive by passing on the fruits of its mistakes, that is, its education or its lore, to the succeeding generation.

Tanner's style is a blend of documentary and fable. He uses techniques such as one scene/one shot, a staple of cin?ma-v?rit? documentary, to portray a fable or folk-story. This tension between fact and fiction, documentary and fable, receives its most exacting treatment in Le Salamandre. Rosemonde's indomitable, rebellious vitality repeatedly defeats the efforts of the two journalists to harness it in a pliable narrative form. After Jonah, Tanner introduces a darker vision in Messidor, Light Years Away, and Dans la ville blanche. The possibility of escaping society by returning to nature is explored and shown to be equally provisional. The tyranny of physical need is portrayed as being just as oppressive and compromising as that of the social world.?DENNIS NASTAV