Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000

press release: 

JONAH WHO WILL BE 25 IN THE YEAR 2000 (JONAH QUI AURA 25 ANS EN L’AN 2000)

Switzerland | 1976 | 35mm | 116 min. | French with English subtitles

Director: Alain Tanner

Cast: Myriam Boyer, Jean-Luc Bideau, Miou-Miou

A group of eight stubbornly nonconformist Genevans from different walks of life get together on a rural retreat to dream of a world which offers more than consumerist inducements in this, another of Tanner’s string of ‘70s masterpieces. Co-written by Tanner and English writer John Berger, this redoubt for May 1968 ideals in the mid-‘70s is that rare explicitly political film that doesn’t reduce its characters to placeholders, a major work of postwar European cinema unforgivably out-of-print on domestic home video.

Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen: Alain Tanner: Among the last lions of the heroic age of the European art film, the Geneva born Tanner burst onto the international cinema scene at age forty with his debut feature, 1969’s Charles, Dead or Alive, completed after stints with the merchant navy and the British Film Institute, where he became charged with the unquiet spirit of the Free Cinema movement. Back home, the fired-up Tanner would forge a radical body of work that bristles at the numbing neutrality and status quo monotony of his native country, a cinema full of rebels, outcasts, and dropouts, where the presiding mood is one of driftlessness and anxious ambivalence, and a filmography ripe for the rediscovery. This touring series has been organized by UW Cinematheque & NYC’s Metrograph and is supported in part by the French House at UW Madison and the Embassy of Switzerland. Special thanks to Andrew Irving, Jake Perlin, and Marcel Müller.

All Cinematheque screenings are free and open to the public.