Charles, Dead or Alive

press release: 

Switzerland | 1969 | 35mm | 93 min. | French with English subtitles

Director: Alain Tanner; Cast: François Simon, Marcel Robert, Marie-Claire Dufour

Tanner’s coruscating debut introduces a figure who will recur throughout his body of work: the individual who, confronting an insupportable social reality, decides instead to launch himself into the unknown without a safety net. In this case, the insubordinate is Simon’s small factory owner, who, faced with perfect middle-class comfort and no end in sight, decides to detonate his cookie-cutter existence. No mere sloganeering radical, Tanner here already shows himself acutely aware of the emotional cost of resistance, drawing blood with his bold opening shot.

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.