ALAIN TANNER
(6 December 1929 - 11 September 2022)
The Swiss film director Alain Tanner, who has died at the age of 92, actually began his career in Britain, working for the British Film Institute. With Claude Goretta (who died in 2019), a friend he had known from his time at the University of Geneva, he came to London in 1955 and they both worked in the BFI’s National Film Archive as well as doing subtitling work.
Their first film together was a short called Nice Time (1957), made through the BFI Experimental Film Fund. It was shown in the Free Cinema programme at the National Film Theatre. In just seventeen minutes it depicted people hanging around Piccadilly Circus, enjoying themselves, going to the pictures and the theatre, flirting with one another, looking for sex and prostitutes and generally having a nice time. The film went on to win the Experimental Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Then the director moved to France and became involved with some of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, although he was not entirely on their wavelength.
Tanner returned to Switzerland in 1960 to work on documentaries for the Swiss French-language television service and with Goretta and others formed Groupe Cinque, an organisation for young Swiss filmmakers. He eventually made his first feature, Charles, Dead or Alive in 1969. It was about a man who drops out of society, becoming an outcast with his hippy friends. The film depicted revolutionary events in Switzerland like those in Paris in 1968. It won the Golden Leopard award at the Locarno Festival.
The painter and writer John Berger collaborated with Tanner on several films including The Salamander (1971) with Bulle Ogier as a woman accused of murdering her uncle. Pursuing his theme of the outsider in society, Tanner went on to make The Middle of the World (1974), about the break-up of a politician’s marriage when he has an affair with a waitress. The events of Paris in 1968 were covered in Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, co-written again with John Berger. Tanner also made a sequel, Jonah and Lila, Till Tomorrow in 1999. Light Years Away had Mick Ford meeting Trevor Howard as an old man building a flying machine. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1981.
Tanner continued to make personal films of all kinds and styles, and was never one to stick to genre cinema. No Man's Land (1985) was set on the borders of Switzerland and France where a lone group of smugglers carry out their illegal trade. It co-starred the actress Myriam Mézières who was in several of Tanner’s films, and with whom he had a long relationship. His last feature in 2004 was Paul s'en va, about a group of students and their missing professor. In 2012 he filmed Rousseau chez Alain Tanner, one of 55 short TV episodes from La faute a Rousseau, in homage to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the tricentenary of his birth.
Alain Tanner married Janine Giudici in 1964 and they were together until his death. In his lifetime, Tanner won prizes at the Berlin International Festival, also at Cannes and Venice and at the French Césars, among several other international awards.
MICHAEL DARVELL