The Middle of the World

press release: 

Switzerland | 1974 | 35mm | 115 min. | French with English subtitles

Director: Alain Tanner; Cast: Olimpia Carlisi, Philippe Léotard, Juliet Berto

After the glad-handing, married Swiss politician Paul (Léotard) falls for an emotionally-withdrawn Italian café waitress (Carlisi), his campaign goes into a subsequent tailspin. Tanner stages the fallout in strikingly stark, formal style, with Brechtian breaks including interstitial date-keeping cartoons, disjunctive landscape shots, and musical interludes by Patrick Moraz. Middle of the World is among Tanner’s most radical films in terms of form, and also among his angriest.

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.