The film director Alain Tanner, who has died aged 92, was a leading light in the Swiss new wave at the start of the 1970s. Tanner’s cinema attempted to arouse “a smug nation drowsed by a facile ideology of neutrality” by looking at alternative lifestyles.
In 1968, Tanner and his friend Claude Goretta co-founded the Groupe 5 collective of Swiss film-makers. They proposed an idea to Swiss TV for the funding of full-length features to be shot in 16mm and then blown up to 35mm for release. This enabled Tanner to make his first feature film, Charles Mort ou Vif (Charles, Dead or Alive, 1969), which won first prize at the Locarno festival, and became the first Swiss film in more than two decades to be shown widely abroad.
