Revisiting Alain Tanner

His name may not ring a bell, but Swiss-born filmmaker Alain Tanner was a key figure in the thriving international arthouse cinema scene of the late 1960s — early 1980s, when films were released into a world inhabited by highly attuned critics and an equally adventurous and receptive audience. His films played alongside those of better-remembered contemporaries such as Fassbinder, Herzog, and Bertolucci, and they captured major international film prizes such as the Locarno Film Festival’s Golden Leopard for Charles, Dead or Alive (1969), and the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Light Years Away (1981).

But, despite his reputation, his films are not often revived today and are next to impossible to see on home video or any of the streaming platforms. I am of the generation that came along a decade and more too late to experience Tanner’s work in a cinema, and, like many of my colleagues around my age, we’ve simply never had a chance to see most of his films.

With that in mind, we’re very excited to be presenting seven of Tanner’s films in September and October, all in 35mm prints. The series was first presented at the Metrograph theater in New York in 2017, and was resurrected and organized into a nationwide tour by our friends at the UW Cinematheque in Madison.

If a person is familiar with any of Tanner’s films it’s likely to be either Le Salamandre (1971) and/or the arthouse hit Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), two of the three films he produced with the great writer John Berger (Ways of Seeing) who collaborated on the scripts with Tanner as well as during the editing stage.

John Powers wrote in Vogue last year that Tanner’s work “feels tailor-made for the Age of Trump…his movies tackle questions that most of us are currently facing…how do you handle the disillusionment of watching history move in the wrong direction?” Tanner’s films take place in the post-1968 world and are inhabited by people questioning and ruminating on a life where the promise of leftist ideals seem to have evaporated and where the current political system is completely at odds with the shared radicalism of just a few years earlier. The series does arrive at an opportune moment.

We hope you’ll take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to introduce yourself to this important body of work under ideal conditions: in our theater, with an audience, and in 35mm.

Image: from Le Salamandre, courtesy of Swiss Films