When the death of Jean-Luc Godard was announced on September 13, 2022, it seemed that the French New Wave itself had died. That impression, led by a baby-boomer understanding of Godard’s work, flows from the double assumption that the Swiss-born Godard was basically French, and that his important work was basically a matter of about a dozen films made over less than a full decade, from À bout de souffle (1960) to Week-end (1967). After that he moved to the Alps, or Switzerland, or something, and then sort of went off the rails.
The death of Alain Tanner two days prior to Godard could have pre-empted some of this nostalgic reductionism, but of course it didn’t work out that way. Compared to Godard, Tanner seemed to be an entirely different figure: a Swiss filmmaker who was clearly Switzerland, an intellectual anchor of that small cinema with some modest acclaim outside, both in Europe and North America. His most famous film, (1976), has a cast of characters held back by their nostalgia for the ’60s, and is clear-eyed about both the loss such nostalgia brings, and [1971] and [1974]), but it also flows from Tanner’s severe but suggestive style—which itself derives, in part, from cinematographer Renato Berta, who shot all three of the Berger–Tanner features, many of Tanner’s other films, as well as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s (1972), (1975), and (1977), and, at around this same time in the late ’70s, Godard’s (1980).
