Legendary Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner dies aged 92
Tanner received an honorary Leopard award at the Locarno Film Festival in 2010 in recognition of his contribution to contemporary filmmaking.
Keystone / Jean-christophe Bott
The Geneva director Alain Tanner, whose first feature, Charles mort ou vif (Charles, Dead or Alive), heralded the beginning of the New Swiss Cinema upon its release in 1970, died on Sunday, an association bearing his name has announced.
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Muere el legendario cineasta suizo Alain Tanner a los 92 años
Tanner was part of the so-called Group of 5, created in 1968, alongside four other directors – Michel Soutter, Jean-Louis Roy, Jean-Jacques Lagrange and Claude Goretta. Together the filmmakers were responsible for a revival of Swiss cinema that went against the grain.
Born in 1929, TannerExternal link was “a strong personality and a very independent man,” Lagrange, the last surviving member of the group, told news agency Keystone-SDA. “It’s sad news.”
The head of Swiss Film Archive, Frédéric Maire, called Tanner “a monument of [Swiss] cinema”.
“It was the New Swiss Cinema and yet his films remain modern even today,” he told Keystone-SDA.
Charles mort ou vif won Tanner the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. He went on to shoot dozens of features, picking up the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival for Les Années lumière (Light Years Away, 1981) and a César for best French film for Dans la ville blanche (In the White City, 1983).
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“[He] is without doubt the best-known Swiss filmmaker” abroad, said Lausanne-born director Lionel Baier, who added that some in Portugal even consider In the White City to be the most beautiful film ever made about Lisbon.
Tanner believed his native Switzerland was “too beautiful and too spectacular” to be filmed, Baier added, yet “he knew how to show a Swiss violence” and to look for drama in a country that had not planned for it.
In the 1960s Tanner supported the drafting of the law on cinema and public funding for Swiss films.
The Geneva native made his last feature film, Paul s’en va, in 2004. He had fought enough for culture and cinema, the director said in an interview on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
Tanner’s body of work entered the Swiss Film Archive in 2014.
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