In the White City

press release: 

Switzerland | 1983 | 35mm | 108 min. | German, Portuguese, French with English subtitles

Director: Alain Tanner; Cast: Bruno Ganz, Teresa Madruga, Julia Vonderlinn

In a filmography filled with unreconciled rebels seeking solitude, few Tanner characters go so far in that direction as the enigmatic sailor Paul (Ganz), who leaves behind his life and his wife to jump ship in Lisbon and dissolve himself into the city. Tanner, master of experimental self-reinvention, here mixes sumptuous images of Paul’s nocturnal wandering with those of his cryptic Super-8 “letters” home, in the process creating a hypnotic, sensual vision of urban anomie.

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.