Subtle Subversion: The Films of Alain Tanner

July 26–August 19, 2018

Championing dreamers and dropouts, political radicals and disaffected youth, Tanner’s films from the late 1960s to the early 1980s feel just as urgent today.

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  • Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000

  • La salamandre

  • The Middle of the World

  • In the White City

  • Light Years Away

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • La salamandre

    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1971
    Thursday, July 26 7 PM
    Introduction by Jon Winet

    Two self-proclaimed writers attempt to retell how a young woman (the amazing Bulle Ogier) shot her uncle in Tanner and cowriter John Berger’s portrait of the free and the defiant—and of those who get in their way. “A witty, shaggy, freewheeling tale” (Vogue).

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  • The Middle of the World

    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1974
    Sunday, July 29 7 PM

    John Berger cowrote the probing, teasingly ambiguous script for this film about the love affair between a Swiss engineer and an Italian immigrant waitress, turning a femme-fatale tragedy into a tale of the growth of a woman’s consciousness.

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  • Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000

    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1976
    Friday, August 3 7 PM

    Tanner’s most celebrated work (coauthored by John Berger) tracks a ragtag group of Swiss dropouts and dreamers and the little refuge they create for themselves. “Seeing it today . . . its undefeated sanity is bracing” (Vogue).

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  • Charles, Dead or Alive

    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1969
    Sunday, August 5 5 PM

    An aging conformist drops out of conventional life and joins a youthful anarchist community in Tanner’s first feature, “the most intelligent film inspired by the spirit of May ’68” (Nouvel observateur).

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  • Messidor

    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1979
    Saturday, August 11 8 PM

    Two fierce young women hit Switzerland’s not-so-open roads in Tanner’s claustrophobic road movie, a deeply pessimistic vision of social restriction that’s more proto–riot grrrl than pre–Thelma and Louise.

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  • Light Years Away

    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, France, 1981
    Wednesday, August 15 7 PM

    Tanner’s first English-language work follows a young drifter (Mick Ford) and a crotchety recluse (Trevor Howard) as they make their way through a mystical, windswept Ireland. “A film that seems to pulsate with love and care for life” (Bruno Jaeggi).

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  • In the White City

    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, Portugal, 1983
    Sunday, August 19 4:30 PM

    One of the key works of eighties European cinema, and one of the great city films, Tanner’s poem/film in praise of solitude and the flâneur tracks a disaffected sailor (Bruno Ganz) wandering the streets of Lisbon.

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