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

  • In the White City

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

    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.

  • Light Years Away

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

    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).

  • Messidor

    • Saturday, August 11 8 PM
    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1979

    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.

  • Charles, Dead or Alive

    • Sunday, August 5 5 PM
    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1969

    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).

  • Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000

    • Friday, August 3 7 PM
    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1976

    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).

  • The Middle of the World

    • Sunday, July 29 7 PM
    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1974

    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.

  • La salamandre

    • Thursday, July 26 7 PM
    Alain Tanner
    Switzerland, 1971

    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).

    Introduction by Jon Winet