Word: tanners
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HARVARD SQUARE THEAER Two films by a young Swiss director named Alain Tanner. Controlled and charming New Wave stuff La Salamandre 2.15,6, 9.45 Charles, Dead or Alive...
...Salamandre nibbles at the edges of the great questions, but it returns always to the irreducible reality of Rosemonde. Tanner's last scene is an extended sequence of the girl walking toward his camera, her head bobbing in the crowd. The shot goes on far longer than one would expect until Tanner's point is made absolutely clear, and Rosemonde is seen as just that indecipherable presence on screen, with any critical judgment rendered superfluous...
...political action but in a spontaneous affirmation of individuality. What passed for leftism in those early sixties was really more an anarchic individualism that interested itself not so much in collective opposition to oppressive institutions but in a private self-realization--life conceived as an aesthetic of personal liberation. Tanner accepts this premise and works it through to its conclusion. In its way, La Salamandre is the consummate New Wave film, and certainly, after fifteen years, the New Wave deserves a little consummation...
...SOON AS the success of La Salamandre became obvious. New York Films rushed into circulation Tanner's first Texture Charles--Dead or Alive, completed in 1969. It is in no sense as mature or finished a product as La Salamandre. It has nothing of the complexity, the subtlety or the wit of that second film. But its New England release concurrent with La Salamandre provides an interesting opportunity to observe Tanner's development...
...full of quotations from classic radical thinkers. But the most significant difference between the two films is in the conception of the central characters. Charles is a tried, contemplative figure whose personal protest is tainted with a bittersweet futility. By the time of La Salamandre, a more optimistic Tanner sees hope residing in the largely unconscious vitality of Rosemonde...