Godard, Tanner, and Switzerland

Jerry White

When the death of Jean-Luc Godard was announced on September 13, 2022, it seemed that the French New Wave itself had died. That impression, led by a baby-boomer understanding of Godard’s work, flows from the double assumption that the Swiss-born Godard was basically French, and that his important work was basically a matter of about a dozen films made over less than a full decade, from À bout de souffle (1960) to Week-end (1967). After that he moved to the Alps, or Switzerland, or something, and then sort of went off the rails. The death of Alain Tanner two days prior to Godard could have pre-empted some of this nostalgic reductionism, but of course it didn’t work out that way. Compared to Godard, Tanner seemed to be an entirely different…

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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 93 - Winter 2023

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