LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Alain Tanner
built 138 days ago
During the late '60s and early '70s, Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner was the key figure in the development and popularization of the "new Swiss cinema." He remains one of his country's best-known directors. Born in Geneva to a writer/painter and an actress, Tanner attended Geneva's Calvin College where he studied economics and became fascinated by cinema. Following graduation and a brief stint as a merchant marine, Tanner began working for the British Film Institute in England where he worked in the information department organizing archives, adding subtitles to foreign films, translating, and other tasks. In 1957, Tanner made a short Free Cinema film, Nice Time, in collaboration with Claude Goretta. The film won a prize at that year's Venice Film Festival and received critical praise in Great Britain.
Source:
This first feature from Alain Tanner (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, Messidor) is a pivotal film that helped revive a dormant Swiss film industry. An incisive, witty look at how society's expectations stifle individualism, the film tells the tale of an upscale watchmaker who drops out his comfortable existence and retreats further and further from the confines of reality. Upset and offended by his behavior, his family has him committed to an asylum. Winner for Best Film at the 1969 Locarno Film Festival. "Beautiful…a poem, a broadsheet, a fable…it has the character of prophecy" (Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker). French with English subtitles.
Source:
Alain Tanner's masterpiece; a sensitive, literate and engaging comedy follows eight individuals affected by the political events of 1968. Tanner describes the film as "a dramatic tragi-comedy in political science fiction." Stars Myriam Boyer, Jean-Luc Bideau, Roger Jendly, Jacques Denis and Miou-Miou as a lovely supermarket clerk with no qualms about liberating groceries. French with English subtitles. Switzerland, 1976, 115 mins.
Source:
Alain Tanner’s JONAH, in spite of fairly short runs in art houses and in university towns, has had a marked impact on radical intellectuals. Bob Stam, in this issue of JUMP CUT and Todd Gitlin in Film Quarterly (30:3, Spring, 1977) celebrate the film’s warmth, charm, optimism, and intelligence, seeing it as a valuable contribution to radical film and politics.
Source:
Alain Tanner (In the White City) directed this Swiss-French-Portuguese drama, based on the novel by Antonio Tabucci. Amid August heat in Lisbon, French author Paul (Francis Frappat) meets various people from his past who surface from his memories into reality. Poet Pierre (Andre Marcon) takes him to a restaurant, and Paul's father (Alexandre Zloto) wants to know how he died. When Paul visits a private club, the headwaiter (Jose Manuel Mendes) bets a bottle of 1952 wine on a billiard shot. Both novel and film serve as tributes to Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who appears here as a character. Shown in the Directors Fortnight section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.
Source:
In the 1970s, mainly French-speaking Swiss directors such as Alain Tanner and Jean-Luc Godard helped to put Swiss films on the cinematographic map. Godard, born to a Swiss family in Paris, spent his early years in Switzerland but later returned to France and was very much influenced by the French cinematic tradition. Swiss film-makers such as Rolf Lyssy, Daniel Schmid, Fredy Murer and Yves Yersin, on the other hand, have taken Swiss life as the basis for their films.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Alain Tanner