Tanner, who was born in 1929, was “a strong personality and a very independent man,” according to Lagrange, the final survivor of the group, who told news agency keystone-SDA. “It’s sad news”.
Tanner joined four other directors, Michel Soutter, Jean-Louis Roy, Jean-Jacques Lagrange, and Claude Goretta, to create the so-called Group of 5, which was established in 1968. Together, the directors brought about an unconventional resurgence in Swiss cinema.
The premiere of politically engaged cinema in Switzerland was “Charles, Dead or Alive,” Tanner’s first full-length feature film, in 1969.
At the Locarno film festival, the movie, which is about a businessman who decides to leave the mainstream of business in order to live on the fringes of society as student protests rage, went against the grain.
Tanner supported the development of the law on cinema and public funding for Swiss films in the 1960s.
Paul s’en va, the Geneva native’s final full-length film, came out in 2004. In an interview given on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the director declared that he had done enough to fight for art and film.
2014 saw the addition of Tanner’s corpus of work to the Swiss Film Archive.
