1 4 Films by Alain Tanner Screening at the Wooden Shoe, 704 South St., Philadelphia. Zine published in collaboration with Shooting Wall. Friday November 2 7PM La Salamandre (The Salamander) 1971 124min. Starring Bulle Ogier, Jean-Luc Bideau, & Jacques Denis Saturday November 3 7 PM Le Milieu du monde (The Middle of the World ) 1974 115min. Starring Olimpia Carlisi, Philippe Léotard, & Juliet Berto Friday November 9 7 PM Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000) 1976 116min. Starring Jean-Luc Bideau, Myriam Boyer, Raymond Bussiéres, Jacques Denis, Roger Jendly, Dominique Labourier, Myriam Mé- ziéres, Miou-Miou, Rufus Saturday November 10 7PM Messidor 1979 123min. Starring Clémentine Amouroux & Catherine Rétouré Contents About Alain Tanner & Resources 3 A Long Introduction 4 Ben Webster Le Milieu du monde 16 Ross Wilbanks Investigating Reality: Character, Idealism, & 19 Political Ideology in Alain Tanner‟s La Salamandre Josh Martin Don‟t Fuck the Boss! 22 Ben Webster 2 About Alain Tanner (courtesy Wikipedia) Alain Tanner (born 6 December 1929, Geneva) is a Swiss film director. Tanner found work at the British Film Institute in 1955, subtitling, translating, and organizing the archive. His first film, Nice Time (1957), a short documen- tary film about Piccadilly Circus during weekend evenings, was made with Claude Goretta. Produced by the British Film Institute Experimental Film Fund, it was first shown as part of the third Free Cinema programme at the Na- tional Film Theatre in May 1957. The debut film won a prize at the film festival in Venice and much critical praise. Tanner went to France for a while where he assisted with several commercial films. There, he met some of the most important directors of the French New Wave in Paris as well as Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque Française. Some critics have found the influences of Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson in his films. But the atmosphere in the film circles of Paris displeased him; he described it as "cutthroat." Between 1960 and 1968, Tanner returned to Switzer- land, and he made more than 40 films as well as doc- umentaries for French-language television there. In 1962, he became the co-founder of the Swiss young filmmakers' "Groupe Cinque." His first feature film, Charles, Dead or Alive (1969), won the first prize at the international film festival in Locarno. His next two films, La Salamandre (1971) and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), were made in close collabo- ration with the art critic and novelist John Berger, who had also worked with him, to a lesser degree and without a credit, on the writing of Charles. Influenced by his involvement with the British "Free Cinema" movement in Lon- don and with the French New Wave during his years in Paris, Tanner is best known for his movies Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000), Dans la ville blanche (In the White City) and Messidor. Dans la ville blanche was entered into the 33rd Berlin International Film Festival. Resources: http://www.swissfilms.ch/static/files/cineportraits/44_Tanner_en.pdf A Possible Cinema: The Films of Alain Tanner. Jim Leach. Scarecrow Press, 1984 3 A Long Introduction Ben Webster 1. I was lucky to start college at the end of the VHS era, when our library still contained a multimedia room of several thousand ambiguously labeled and poorly cataloged videos and LPs housed on dented metal shelving, with a few old vcrs and records players to play them on. I spent a lot of time with this collection, in which Video Yesteryears (in plain yellow cases) and New Yorker Videos (iconic square logo) predominated, selecting titles sometimes at random and sometimes by obscure criteria. After my freshman year, these criteria swung to the political. Seattle happened, and in my provincial city a handful of young people tried to plug into the expression of this event through the vehicle of anarchism. As I scoured the videotapes, I looked for new terms: revolution, activist, protest, socialism. After burning through the obvious titles, I came across a New Yorker tape one night, a Swiss film from the 70s titled Jonas Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. I watched it in a cloistered cubicle, and found it strange. The characters were all much older than I was at the time, but seemingly more confused and uncertain about the world and their place in it. It was obviously a politi- cal film- in dialogue, scenario, and references- but nothing in it was tangibly political in the way I understood it at the time, no images of protests, riots, group meetings, debates. I liked Jonas, it was funny and engaging, but I shortly filed it away and mostly forgot about it. Nearly a decade later, in 2010, I watched two more films from Tanner at a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. In the intervening years my political and cinematic sensibilities had changed greatly. Ironically, the first decade of the 21st century paralleled that of Jonas's 68'ers through the retrenchment of the 70s. Since the flush of the alter-globalization move- ment in the late 90s, we had experienced the same horrifying lurch to the right in the Bush years- 9/11, the failed anti-war movement and invasion of Iraq, and a paranoid security re- gime which enabled a roll-back on civil liberties and crack-down on social movements. Com- pelled to re-watch Jonas, I immediately identified with the emotional position of its protago- nists, at the end of an ambiguous sequence of hope, resignation, accommodation, cynicism, introspection, and re-engagement. I also reappraised the film's political import- not merely about the absence or end of political practice, but imminently a critique of capitalism and diagnostic of new radical prospects. Subsequently tracking down Tanner's other films from the late 60s and 70s, it became appar- ent that Jonas was just one iteration in an ongoing effort throughout this period. Although each film stands alone, I found that reading them as an on-going dialogue over time brought out their most interesting political content. Concurrent with my rediscovery of Tanner, the Occupy movement erupted across the country, and I became involved with the Philadelphia encampment. This cycle of global struggles- in Europe against austerity, in North Africa and the Middle East against autocracy- reinvigorated, but also frustrated as it quickly ran up against limits of state repression and internal coherence. In the winter following Occupy, as we waited indoors for a promised “Spring Offensive” that never arrived, I tried to rethink Tan- ner's work and why it appealed to me so much. Despite being so strongly marked by their own times, so many observations and concepts in the work appeal to our own moment: metropolitan alienation, criminal becomings, co-investigations, provincial corruption, invention of collec- tive socialities, transversal modes of annunciation and subversion. In organizing these screen- ings, I hope to both draw attention to some under-appreciated films and to try to think them, politically, in the present. Of the six films directed by Alain Tanner between 1969 and 1979, the Wooden Shoe is screen- ing four: La Salamandre (1971), Le Milieu du monde (1974), Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (1976), and Messidor (1979). Charles mort ou vif (1969) is widely available on videocas- sette, while Le Retour d'afrique (1972) remains unsubtitled and rarely screened. I'll refer to 4 First we make inquiries... all six films, most produced in collaboration with writer John Berger, since they are in a constant dialogue and reworking of themes and techniques. This zine and accompanying screenings are an effort to consider them as a coherent yet open arc or series of political film- making. In what way is Tanner making political films? It is a slightly different question than how we make sense, politically, of them. I bring it up to clarify several important points. We should distinguish between Tanner‟s critique of his own times and our contemporary efforts. These films present a powerful attack on capitalism and its ideological apparatuses that maintains in so much as our present situation continues to be dominated by these same pow- ers. But for all the subtlety of the critique, it can be an obstacle more than an aid in thinking the present (a general danger in the continuing appeal to the left today of the militant culture of the 60s and 70s.) So the actions, attitudes, and political positions framed by Tanner in his narratives should not serve as a model for our own activity. Hence the confusion of my 19 year old self viewing Jonas- the models of activity were too ambiguous and abstract, the polit- ical proclamations tepid. No one called themselves an anarchist or waved a red and/or black flag. Regardless of how the films were perceived at the time, I think we can now read this arc as an inquiry in motion, investigating through scenarios of rebellious subjectivities in encounter the possibilities for revolutionary activity in the new conjuncture of Europe post-68. Film to film, the tone and focus of the inquiry shifts, tracking the receding tide of social antagonism and consolidation of what Tanner calls the “normalization” of society (From the voice-over of Le Milieu du monde: “Normalization means that between nations, classes, and divergent po- litical systems exchange is allowed, provided nothing changes.”) Yet these works are not a chronicle of defeat and resignation. With few exceptions, they remain humorous and gleeful- ly subversive, told from the perspective of the undoing of the status quo, not of its preserva- tion.