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4 Films by Alain Tanner

Screening at the Wooden Shoe, 704 South St., Philadelphia. Zine published in collaboration with Shooting Wall. Friday November 2 7PM

La Salamandre

(The Salamander) 1971 124min. Starring Bulle Ogier, Jean-Luc Bideau, & Jacques Denis Saturday November 3 7 PM

Le Milieu du monde

(The Middle of the World ) 1974 115min. Starring Olimpia Carlisi, Philippe Lotard, & Juliet Berto Friday November 9 7 PM (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000) 1976 116min. Starring Jean-Luc Bideau, Myriam Boyer, Raymond Bussires, Jacques Denis, Roger Jendly, Dominique Labourier, Myriam Mzires, Miou-Miou, Rufus Saturday November 10 7PM

Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000

Messidor

1979 123min. Starring Clmentine Amouroux & Catherine Rtour

Contents
About Alain Tanner & Resources A Long Introduction Ben Webster 3 4 16 19

Le Milieu du monde
Ross Wilbanks Investigating Reality: Character, Idealism, & Political Ideology in Alain Tanners

La Salamandre
Josh Martin

Dont Fuck the Boss! Ben Webster

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About Alain Tanner (courtesy Wikipedia)

Alain Tanner (born 6 December 1929, Geneva) is a Swiss film director. Tanner found work at the British Film Institute in 1955, subtitling, translating, and organizing the archive. His first film, Nice Time (1957), a short documentary film about Piccadilly Circus during weekend evenings, was made with Claude Goretta. Produced by the British Film Institute Experimental Film Fund, it was first shown as part of the third Free Cinema programme at the National Film Theatre in May 1957. The debut film won a prize at the film festival in Venice and much critical praise. Tanner went to France for a while where he assisted with several commercial films. There, he met some of the most important directors of the French New Wave in Paris as well as Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinmathque Franaise. Some critics have found the influences of Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson in his films. But the atmosphere in the film circles of Paris displeased him; he described it as "cutthroat." Between 1960 and 1968, Tanner returned to Switzerland, and he made more than 40 films as well as documentaries for French-language television there. In 1962, he became the co-founder of the Swiss young filmmakers' "Groupe Cinque." His first feature film, Charles, Dead or Alive (1969), won the first prize at the international film festival in Locarno. His next two films, La Salamandre (1971) and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), were made in close collaboration with the art critic and novelist John Berger, who had also worked with him, to a lesser degree and without a credit, on the writing of Charles. Influenced by his involvement with the British "Free Cinema" movement in London and with the French New Wave during his years in Paris, Tanner is best known for his movies Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000), Dans la ville blanche (In the White City) and Messidor. Dans la ville blanche was entered into the 33rd Berlin International Film Festival.

Resources:
http://www.swissfilms.ch/static/files/cineportraits/44_Tanner_en.pdf

A Possible Cinema: The Films of Alain Tanner. Jim Leach. Scarecrow Press,
1984

A Long Introduction
Ben Webster
1. I was lucky to start college at the end of the VHS era, when our library still contained a multimedia room of several thousand ambiguously labeled and poorly cataloged videos and LPs housed on dented metal shelving, with a few old vcrs and records players to play them on. I spent a lot of time with this collection, in which Video Yesteryears (in plain yellow cases) and New Yorker Videos (iconic square logo) predominated, selecting titles sometimes at random and sometimes by obscure criteria. After my freshman year, these criteria swung to the political. Seattle happened, and in my provincial city a handful of young people tried to plug into the expression of this event through the vehicle of anarchism. As I scoured the videotapes, I looked for new terms: revolution, activist, protest, socialism. After burning through the obvious titles, I came across a New Yorker tape one night, a Swiss film from the 70s titled Jonas Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. I watched it in a cloistered cubicle, and found it strange. The characters were all much older than I was at the time, but seemingly more confused and uncertain about the world and their place in it. It was obviously a political film- in dialogue, scenario, and references- but nothing in it was tangibly political in the way I understood it at the time, no images of protests, riots, group meetings, debates. I liked Jonas, it was funny and engaging, but I shortly filed it away and mostly forgot about it. Nearly a decade later, in 2010, I watched two more films from Tanner at a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. In the intervening years my political and cinematic sensibilities had changed greatly. Ironically, the first decade of the 21st century paralleled that of Jonas's 68'ers through the retrenchment of the 70s. Since the flush of the alter-globalization movement in the late 90s, we had experienced the same horrifying lurch to the right in the Bush years- 9/11, the failed anti-war movement and invasion of Iraq, and a paranoid security regime which enabled a roll-back on civil liberties and crack-down on social movements. Compelled to re-watch Jonas, I immediately identified with the emotional position of its protagonists, at the end of an ambiguous sequence of hope, resignation, accommodation, cynicism, introspection, and re-engagement. I also reappraised the film's political import- not merely about the absence or end of political practice, but imminently a critique of capitalism and diagnostic of new radical prospects. Subsequently tracking down Tanner's other films from the late 60s and 70s, it became apparent that Jonas was just one iteration in an ongoing effort throughout this period. Although each film stands alone, I found that reading them as an on-going dialogue over time brought out their most interesting political content. Concurrent with my rediscovery of Tanner, the Occupy movement erupted across the country, and I became involved with the Philadelphia encampment. This cycle of global struggles- in Europe against austerity, in North Africa and the Middle East against autocracy- reinvigorated, but also frustrated as it quickly ran up against limits of state repression and internal coherence. In the winter following Occupy, as we waited indoors for a promised Spring Offensive that never arrived, I tried to rethink Tanner's work and why it appealed to me so much. Despite being so strongly marked by their own times, so many observations and concepts in the work appeal to our own moment: metropolitan alienation, criminal becomings, co-investigations, provincial corruption, invention of collective socialities, transversal modes of annunciation and subversion. In organizing these screenings, I hope to both draw attention to some under-appreciated films and to try to think them, politically, in the present. Of the six films directed by Alain Tanner between 1969 and 1979, the Wooden Shoe is screening four: La Salamandre (1971), Le Milieu du monde (1974), Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (1976), and Messidor (1979). Charles mort ou vif (1969) is widely available on videocassette, while Le Retour d'afrique (1972) remains unsubtitled and rarely screened. I'll refer to

First we make inquiries...

all six films, most produced in collaboration with writer John Berger, since they are in a constant dialogue and reworking of themes and techniques. This zine and accompanying screenings are an effort to consider them as a coherent yet open arc or series of political filmmaking. In what way is Tanner making political films? It is a slightly different question than how we make sense, politically, of them. I bring it up to clarify several important points. We should distinguish between Tanners critique of his own times and our contemporary efforts. These films present a powerful attack on capitalism and its ideological apparatuses that maintains in so much as our present situation continues to be dominated by these same powers. But for all the subtlety of the critique, it can be an obstacle more than an aid in thinking the present (a general danger in the continuing appeal to the left today of the militant culture of the 60s and 70s.) So the actions, attitudes, and political positions framed by Tanner in his narratives should not serve as a model for our own activity. Hence the confusion of my 19 year old self viewing Jonas- the models of activity were too ambiguous and abstract, the political proclamations tepid. No one called themselves an anarchist or waved a red and/or black flag. Regardless of how the films were perceived at the time, I think we can now read this arc as an inquiry in motion, investigating through scenarios of rebellious subjectivities in encounter the possibilities for revolutionary activity in the new conjuncture of Europe post-68. Film to film, the tone and focus of the inquiry shifts, tracking the receding tide of social antagonism and consolidation of what Tanner calls the normalization of society (From the voice-over of Le Milieu du monde: Normalization means that between nations, classes, and divergent political systems exchange is allowed, provided nothing changes.) Yet these works are not a chronicle of defeat and resignation. With few exceptions, they remain humorous and gleefully subversive, told from the perspective of the undoing of the status quo, not of its preservation. This effort to do justice to new forms of political expression is happily paralleled in Tanners formal style. The six films are rich with techniques of narrative, editing, and mise en scene that challenge the reified forms of the culture industry. Neither the films nor the characters portrayed within are avant gardist. Human and accessible, but fundamentally unreconciled with the prevailing order.

The contributors to this zine take up in detail specific moments in the arc. Ross Wilbanks provides a series of reference points to Le Milieu that articulate that films formal structure and political worldview. Josh Martin renders La Salamandres narrative unfolding as a disillusioning lesson on realistic praxis for the left. Later in this piece Ill argue for the group-information as the central political subject across all six films. In a separate piece I contrast the sexual and class politics of Le Milieu with a contemporaneous film, Eric Rohmers L'Amour l'aprs-midi . But first, both to provide an expansive frame of reference and to inform the reader who is unable to watch all the films discussed, Ill briefly describe some general characteristics of the six films. Across this decade of work, Tanner, John Berger, and other collaborators developed a portfolio of techniques that constitute a unique style built upon a surface realism. The single feature that most endures is the personalities of the characters, a witty and likable bunch, but almost always on the margins. Drop-outs, immigrants, eccentrics, disaffected youth, precarious proletarians, radical malcontents without a political home- much more than protagonists, they are taken seriously as political agents, especially so in that they inevitably enter into dynamic combination. The motor is the collective grouping in process of formation and dissolution- the couple or the group. The camera most frequently favors group compositions, either static medium shots precisely encompassing every individual, or floating pans across its subjects (eschewing conventional practices of shot/reverse-shots or psychological close-ups.) When this pattern is broken, as it is several times in La Salamandre, the effect is all the more jarring in the tearing away of the individual from the group. Tanner opens a loop between narrative, audience, and author with frequent use of voice-overs and title cards. Whereas other film-makers imbue their work with a cold Brechtian remove with such techniques, here they usually function otherwise. Words and images are taken seriously as apparatuses of ideological interpellation, but also of utopian inspiration and radical malleability. Tanner revels in symbolic materials- the sausage-time and onion-socius of Jonas, La Salamandres rifle and salamander, Le Milieus scar, but never reduces them to crude psychoanalytic functions. They are often the products of the imaginal attempts of the protagonists to comprehend their world. The accumulation of images, allusions, and objects- the stuff of culture crowding the films and spilling over from narrative- are fodder for the subversive imagination, but also the residue of dead dreams and impossible fantasies. Action derives as much from the creative encounter of individuals with ideological apparatuses as with other characters. Swiss national contradictions are extremely important here, the physical and cultural specificity of the country are always more than a mere setting. Tanner returns to a foundational contradiction- the majestic Alpine geography is the site of a cramped, conservative society. A contrast between exteriors and interiors, open and closed spaces, plays within films and across the oeuvre. Exteriors, and in turn those films where exterior shots and montages predominate, become menacing and ironic reminders of repression, never quite what they seem. Geneva cityscapes of Le retour mock the reclusive protagonists as not-Africa (the continent of the title appearing only as representation in magazines, books, posters, and poetry.) Pastoral fields of central Switzerland defy the rationalization of capitalist modernity, snowing in the summer, verdant in the winter, in Le Milieu. The ironic contrast is most extreme in Messidor, which opens with majestic, sweeping aerial shots of the nation, only to excoriate this place as one of alienation, limitation, capture, and death. Interior spaces are frequently richer in potential, modeled somewhat on the protagonists psyches- empty or cluttered, high or low, filled with images and allusions. Tanners protagonists are always bodily contextualized in a definite cultural and physical space. They move antagonistically through it, or slow to a temporary halt, encountering others and constituting group subjectivities that can confront flows of words, claims, and imperatives and either wield them as subversive tools, or fall victim to a fatalistic repetition of alienated habits and language.

Others stay. I never do. Im not quite normal.

2. In Tanners milieus, the movement of the world is always rendered distant and banal, the movement of subjectivities vital and dynamic. Yet his films remain imminently political, because his subjects are bearers not of bourgeois ideological messages, but of rage and imagination, fighting for voice and action against these precise ideological restraints. The site of this fight is the group in encounter. The encounter is usually precipitated by a dropping-out, an abandonment of prescribed social activity, often a refusal of work and flight from the workplace (Charles De, Le Retours couple, Rosemonde, the Messidors.) Characters are compelled to drastically change their habits and ways of being with others. It is not necessary for us to extrapolate symbolic functions for these encounters- say, stand-ins for the workers and students encountering each other in May 68- to find a richness of political meaning in them. All of Tanners six films in this period move with variations of the group encounter. Specifically, two distinct varieties of the group, which Ill call the couple (group of 2) and the commune (group of 3 or more.) Commune might strike some as an overly optimistic term- it is my own invention and is not specifically referenced in the films. I use to indicate what I see as a more important difference than number of people to the couple. This is the real, not latent, potential for utopian projectivity and effective action that is limited in Tanners films solely to this grouping.) Both formations are torn between utopian possibility and the corruption of reification and separation from the larger world. Although the nascent communes fare better, even their successes must be carefully guarded, lest they succumb to the imperatives of capitalism and state ideological apparatuses. Within nearly all of his characters the same dialectic is at play: utopian cooperation and alienated competition, affirmation of difference and conformist pressures, truth and ideology. It is this obsession that has left Tanners work open to accusations of being petty-bourgeois from Marxist critics. Yet what is revolution if not the coming into being and maintenance of the utopian group-in-formation? (No small question to those of us who feverishly threw ourselves into the Occupy movement only to see it evaporate into the air after a few short months.) Tanner does not present a science of revolutionary organization for an audience of militants- which would probably make for uninteresting movies. What is ventured is an alchemy of the group encounter and the possibilities for making the revolutionary amalgamation hold and extend itself in a hostile environment.

Commune films are Tanners spaces to exult, to jest, to set free lines of flight. Charles mort ou vif, La Salamandre, and Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 are examples of these works. Bourgeois drop-out Charles De finds refuge in the rural home of a bohemian couple, eventually joined by his daughter, a student radical. The eight marginals of Jonas share a reference point in the political and cultural upheavals of the late 60s, but are all adrift in the lurch to the right of the mid-70s. It is only in their encounter across the Geneva metropolis, and eventually at a suburban market farm, that each is able, if only briefly, to reignite and sustain the projects initiated during the period of revolt. The most enigmatic and suggestive commune is formed by two writers and a headstrong prole accused of shooting her uncle in La Salamandre. Initially investigating Rosemonde for a freelance commission, Paul and Pierre inaugurate a communal grouping once she walks off her job at a sausage factory. Implicated in affective exchanges (love-making, sharing of food, massage), they establish a fragile grouping based at Pierres spartan apartment. In a curious parallel to the practice of workers inquiry developing at the same moment (Pierre: First we make inquiries...) the men, themselves marginal to the waged mainstream, launch an investigation into working class, female alienation, with a privileged subject on hand. And, not unlike the convoluted development of militant inquiry, their investigation is complicated and ultimately thwarted by competing imperatives. Some have read this (see Josh Martin's article here) as a metaphor for the left's failure to make change in a world hostile to its ideas and practices- the intellectual left and the working class as mutually inscrutable camps, separated by a wide gulf. Indeed, the film's voice-over would seem to encourage this interpretation. However, we can also trace a counter-reading that puts equal weight for the failure of the Pierre-Paul-Rosemonde commune on its unstable class formation and social pressures- the discipline of Rosemonde's workplace, the writers' looming deadline and dwindling funds, the persistence of sexism and patriarchal relationships. Perhaps the dissolution of the collective is not inevitable, but just likely. The commune fractures when Paul literally drags Rosemonde back to the shoe shop she has recently quit, in order for her to resume working. Yet Paul's intent is benevolent; should she not return to work, Rosemonde would likely be subject to the even greater repressive force of the police, who wrongly suspect her of robbing the store. It is a cracking-up amidst intense, unjust pressure. The challenges of the commune are well understood by Tanner, lying not in the consolidation of the same, but in the harmonization of the different. Charles De and his bohemian housemates could not be further apart in appearance or habit. Even in La Salamandre, where the gulf between the writers and their subject is front and center, the men themselves are highly dissimilar- one a moonlighting, married house painter, the other a cantankerous free-lancing bachelor. Refugees from a highly individualistic, atomized society, the force of gravity drawing them together is more dissimilarity to a norm of consumerist contentment, than to any particular ideal subjectivity. By drawing together and forming the commune, new possibilities are created, new forms of life in common. Alienation is the crucible of encounter, the group-in-formation the motor of the new, but, as emphasized in La Salamandre, these are fragile machines that break down if not oiled by continuous acts of revolt and imagination.

Jonas is particularly interesting in this regard. Tanner and Berger's screenplay artificially
emphasizes the symmetry between the eight main characters, each of who's name begins with the letters Ma-, and all of who are of the generation most profoundly shaped by the rupture of 68 and its concomitant revolutions in attitude, ways of life, and cultural expression. Yet the dramatic propulsion of the film comes from the differences between them in their unlikely coming together (humorously played up in the sexual frisson between tantric Madeline

The freedom to be yourself is systematically denied to too many people.

and protestant Max.) The bond is their individual grievances with capitalist society, and the micropolitical acts of resistance that weave together and consolidate their communal network. The terrain of encounter, prophetically, is not the workplace or campus, but Geneva and its metropolitan hinterlands. In Tanner's works, labor marginality is often an index of potential subversion, and so with a true post-68 sensibility, the seedbed of revolt is not in the stable postwar working class, but in the precarious, unsettled proletariat propelling the reorganization of capital along global, post-Fordist lines. Mathieu, militant fed up with industrial discipline; Marco, teacher in revolt against conservative educational mandates; Madeline, white collar mole and mystical seeker of authenticity; Marcel, farmer disgusted with industrial civilization; Marguerite, organic food crusader and sexual libertine; Max, former activist disillusioned with the left yet unreconciled with capitalist hegemony; Marie, precariously employed undocumented alien; Mathilde, struggling against the double oppression of class and gender. A symbolic representation of the new social movements of the 70s- the women's liberation, environmental, and counter-cultural movements for example. What an impoverished political reading of Jonas if all we produce is such a laundry list! It is not Tanner's intent to document the existence of these movements, well known by the mid70s, to champion or critique them, but rather to animate them in a double movement. First, to draw together the personal and the political, not merely to put a face on this or that movement, but to highlight the everyday fabric of consent and rebellion that renders collective action thinkable, possible, and actual. Second, to reject static characterizations of these forces by putting in motion the contradictions, contingencies, and conflicts within them. We may take Mathieu's radical free school as one example. By what alchemy did this material project arise from the encounter between the family of a disgruntled factory militant and luddite farmers, and what was unsustainable in this formation that leads to its ultimate dissolution? Or, what happens in the meeting of a new agey secretary (Madeline), a cynical proof-reader (Max), and said luddites, that successfully thwarts the designs of a rapacious land developer? It is to the film's credit that these political gestations transcend a crude symbolic schematism. Rather,

with laughter, screaming, and tears Jonas captures well the unpredictable course of the commune-in-creation. We should not shy away from the film's tentative conclusion- absent a binding, centralizing power along the lines of the state or the party, the convergence of experiences and desires in a revolutionary group subjectivity is a process equally joyous and tormented. The couple, if it is ultimately a group ending in frustration and despair for Tanner, is not without a propulsive power of utopian desire. The tragedy of the couple lies not in the intensity of the encounter, but its removal from a wider milieu in which a proliferating sequence of encounters could occur. The cloistered would-be emigrant couple of Le Retour d'Afrique are animated by disgust and boredom, to which Africa calls as site of cultural authenticity and revolutionary potential. When their arranged transport to Africa falls through, they themselves collapse back into the impoverished world of the nuclear couple, dramatized in the film by their claustrophobic confinement to a bare Geneva apartment. Their degraded and corrupted group potential is represented in a spiralling disregard for hygiene, language, and care. Ironically, once they emerge from their confinement, they conform to the bland lifestyle of a young working class family by returning to their jobs and moving to a newly constructed apartment on the outskirts of the city. But for Tanner, this return to the social realm, even in a conformist, consumerist mode, offers more political potential than a cloistered militancy. The film concludes with the couple organizing a rent strike among the apartment's tenants.\ The couple can not constitute the commune, rendering their attempts at escaping from the imperatives of capitalist reproduction fore-doomed. A coupling is far more susceptible to outside pressures, their micro-politics denied room for movement. Tanner's couple films are visually dominated by images of the Swiss landscape, with its forbidding peaks and harshly beautiful vistas- striking reminders of the hostility of the surrounding society. As the social landscape becomes increasingly repressive through the course of the 70s, Tanner's prognosis for the couple progressively dims. If in Le Retour the couple finds redemption through the return to the antagonistic social plane, in Le Milieu du monde no such redemption is possible. Not only is redemption foreclosed in Messidor, the utopian couple-in-formation is also destined to end in madness and murder, the only line of flight remaining that of animal criminality. As in La Salamandre, the group formation of Le Milieu du monde is rift by a class divide. The love affair between provincial man without qualities Paul and immigrant waitress Adriana is premised not only upon mutual physical attraction, but on an attraction between two sets of thwarted desires. Paul, engineer and political candidate, suffers from a general ennui, while Adriana faces the material oppression of class, nationality, and gender. In the most forceful authorial tones in this body of work, Tanner and Berger express via an authoritative voice-over the impossibility of the fulfillment of individual hopes, of constructive potential, in such an arrangement. Hopes shatter against lies, opportunism, fear the woman's voice intones. For all of this forceful commentary, the class dynamics of the couple are not played for explicit political polemic (I venture such a polemic in another article in this zine.) The gulf is implied or marked by class commodity signifiers, as when Paul gives as a gift to Adriana a new 8mm camera, to which she replies But what would I film? For an isolated woman far from home who's life is consumed by work, there's no practical use for this toy of the bourgeoisie. Paul is not without some courage in abrogating his class position- as their affair intensifies, he willfully shrugs off the potential negative fallout on his campaign. Nevertheless the corrupting powers of the couple unwilling or unable to negotiate an encounter across profound differ-

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Hopes remain, but they are normalized into old stereotypical attitudes.
ences, one as here that reorients its aims toward the material and ideological falsities of bourgeois culture, are overpowering. The barrenness of this group's trajectory is indicated not only directly through voice-over, but also in the film's most striking visual motif: Swiss fields in different seasons, inserted in jarring juxtaposition to the realist narrative sequence. These shots function as abstract slates that draw attention to the contradictions of a class and gender stratified culture both in the Paul/ Adriana coupling and at large. Often edited close to expressions of Paul's erotic ecstacy, they would seem to also link these contradictions to a larger national Swiss mythology premised on a supposed harmonious unity of disparate linguistic and geographic communities, a view close to that espoused in Paul's technocratic campaign speeches. Regardless, the forced abstraction of the field shots is another mark against the couple, who are doubly doomed by this abstraction and a closed individualism (the two are almost never filmed with other figures, except in the neutral space of the cafe.) In the film's final voice-over, Tanner emphasizes this neutralization of hope and stymieing of desire within a social field of normalization that affords no opportunities for real change. This is the film-maker's most powerful statement on the poverty of subversive desire without a field for expression, of exodus without program, of individual change without collective struggle, and vice versa. To cite Deleuze and Guattari's famous defense of their theoretical construct, Paul and Adriana in the their line of flight fail to grab a weapon as they flee. The couple in Messidor grab a weapon, but find their line of flight blocked by a Europe a decade removed by calendar reckoning, but light years away from the event of 68. In one sense, the film is a validation and continuation of Jonas's communal project. With the communal farm dissolved and the 68'ers dispersed, the project passes to a new generation, nomadic and unburdened by the experience of failed revolution. Class differences are played down between Geneva college student Jeanne and rural prole Marie. Both are young women in a new era which, in the vocabulary of previous films, has been completely normalized, which for two

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young women on their own, regardless of class background, means a culture of impunity for male sexual predators and agents of violent conformity. Their chance encounter hitchhiking on the same stretch of highway leads to a bond that can only hold in constant movement and dislocation from work and community. Whereas Le Milieu's couple engaged in a fixed struggle of territorializing movements, ultimately unstable and impossible, Messidor posits a groupin-formation purely deterritorializing. After accidentally killing a rapist in self-defense and stealing a police officer's pistol, they become a war machine, articulated as girl + gun + antagonistic subjectivity. Their political project is one first of escape, then of criminality, and finally of a mad solidarity in their mutual becoming-animal. Tanner's acumen and political intelligence are most apparent here- Jeanne and Marie are not thinkable as political agents to mainstream society, yet he endows them with the power of extreme negative critique and a glimmer of utopian possibility. The Messidors are heroines in the vein of Tiqqun, the London riots, and punk- in other words, our contemporaries, championed as vanguard by some factions of the left, denounced as lumpen by others. The Messidorian war machine's insurrectionary project takes place across a Swiss landscape pain-stakingly filmed to seduce with the appearance of free movement and beauty. The reality, however, is of a world over-determined by capitalism's ideological, productive, surveillance, media, and gender-ordering mechanisms. Moving with the speed of a pinball, but just as entrapped by a complex field of pre-determined constraints, this war machine's self-valorization must end inevitably in self-annihilation. The conclusion of Messidor, which also concludes this cycle of films, is despairing. The subversive group subject, forced into this final configuration of criminal-couple, has failed, leaving in doubt the possibility of challenging capitalist hegemony. Unlike many of his peers on the left, Tanner spends little time documenting traditional expressions of working class struggle. Instead of dwelling in the traditional places- physical and political- of the workers' movement, Tanner's investigations take him to the margins and lacuna of working class life. Although the majority of his characters are indeed working class, they display little loyalty to the organizations and rituals that had dominated in the post-war era. Instead he presents a mosaic of new formations struggling to configure themselves and to constitute a project larger than the individual, but in which individuals matter. We witness in these films an intuition of great changes, which lack an adequate political vocabulary or cinematic technique of expression. Prescriptions, therefore, are few, but descriptions rich. Of utmost concern is the alchemy of holding the encounter under physical and psychic duress. To borrow, as I've done throughout this reflection, from an emerging vocabulary contemporary but seemingly unknown to Tanner, these films offer not the nostalgic lamentation on the decomposition of the old that is frequently ascribed to them, but rather a hopeful yet sober poetry of possible recomposition. 3. We can further identify several privileged themes that recur in Tanner's cycle of nascent recomposition, and remain of importance today: women as bearers of subversion, historical consciousness, and projective imagination.

La Salamandre's Rosemonde is the richest character anywhere in these six films. Her subversive power is such that through the course of the film the driving question of her nature changes from Did she shoot her uncle? to Why was she justified in doing so? Although her activity does not assume properly political form (her collective encounters with the two writ-

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Thats a lie. Were not in the same boat.

ers, co-workers, and all others are combative and untenable), the sheer strength of her resistance to patriarchal bourgeois society forces irresistible disruptions. That the film implies a creeping madness in butting against such an adversary is tempered by the lucidity of her autobiographical monologues (Others stay. I never do. I'm not quite normal.) Here is an early expression of Tanner's critique of existing leftist politics. For all their investigative and sociological methods, Rosemonde remains inscrutable and incapable of capture by the wellintentioned writers- her subject position does not fit with dogmatic accounts of working class political organization. Of rural roots, without fixed working position, outside of family and expressive of undisciplined refusal. Adriana of Le Milieu represents a more classical proletarian woman- she relates to Paul her family history of industrial militancy- but one displaced by capitalist restructuring, forced to emigrate in search of work to Switzerland following the death of her husband, a factory worker. Taken out of her element, the film's remote, class-ambiguous milieu heightens the emerging feminist critiques of the double duty of productive and reproductive labor demanded of women. Even as mistress, Adriana performs a second shift beyond her waitressing gig, performing caring and affective labor to soothe the nerves and stroke the vanity of Paul. As in Jonas and Messidor, Tanner's co-incidence with the development of the women's liberation movement, especially of its Marxist currents, stems less from an explicit avowal or portrayal of feminist politics than from a defamiliarizing critique of patriarchy and the material limits of women's agency. It is of course Adriana who ends the affair, even if it means more forced movement and ultimately a return to the drudgery of the factory. The Messidors are feminists implicitly, and their environment is one of constant threat of patriarchal abuse and violence. Similar to La Salamandre's shift of focus, the film pivots from an inquiry into their descent into banditry to a valorization of it, given the narrative accounting of material oppression and alienation. It would be a very different film were the protagonists men.

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In Jonas a more literal meaning to women as bearer of rebellious activity is given: namely, Madeline's pregnancy of Jonas, the film's explicit symbol of hope. Unlike in conservative natalist visions, the bearer of the future enters the world in an explicitly communal setting, one where men visibly and actively take part in traditionally female reproductive labor such as cooking, child care, and education. Although one could argue that Tanner chauvinistically portray's Madeline's fantasy sequence as limited by dreams of fertility and motherhood, I would argue that the director is instead presenting the desire to give birth and raise children as one of many that women express, but one that is frustrated by capitalism, and better realized in a communized society that has overcome the closed nuclear family. This thrust into the future announced by the birth of Jonas is one example of the films' preoccupation with time. Much critical writing on Tanner has emphasized his utopian themes, a constant return to that which is yet to come, because the present is too constrained or does not yet offer the proper tools to effect change. Jonas expresses this both through the individual fantasies of the eight protagonists (rendered in black and white sequences) and in their projective communal efforts- educating children in a freer and more democratic way, positing a relationship to food and land at odds with the imperatives of capitalist development, creating a space for honest debate and self-expression, and, even in the waning of the collective endeavor and Mathieu's bitter return to the factory, a defiant pledge that his children will be the generation to finally triumph. But in Jonas and elsewhere, temporality is not only future-directed, but inevitably tied to a past series of reference points and failed possibilities. Mathieu's bitter monologue is punctuated by newsreel images of Swiss upheavals, as though to indicate the remembrance of past heroics as inspiration for the future. There is ambiguity in this approach, however, signaled not only by the return to the unchanging visage of Rousseau's statue, but also in Mathieu's relationship with high school history teacher Marco. A coiled sausage is Marco's unorthodox metaphor for a philosophy of history- of history expressed in folds of time. Whereas Marco's approach engages his students, when Mathieu is invited to lecture on Marxist crisis theory, his dogmatic schematics bores them. Is his account of history discounted due to the hegemony of bourgeois worldviews, or is Mathieu's teleological conceptualization itself flawed? I think we can state on balance that for Tanner the past is neither a model to return to nor a failure from which to flee, but rather a propulsive force that demands new configurations. The present is clearly the most dangerous ground, as evidenced by the present-ness of Messidor, in which past reference points (namely the French Revolution) are abstracted to attitudes of ironic disdain, and the future is blank and hopeless. Le Retour is likewise about nothing more than the trap of the present, in which the motor of time has broken down, severing the driving force that links past and future. The importance of time enters these works in other modes. The slight tilt of setting into the near-future of Charles provides Tanner with room to maneuver dynamic, defamiliarizing elements into the generalized confusion of Charles and his commune: women have been granted the right to vote, youth organizations are blocking the highways to press their demands. This shift is indicated entirely in ambient news broadcasts- everything else is indistinguishable from the present. While the rationale for this narrative device remains obscure in Charles, it indicates a discomfort or feeling of constraint in telling stories solely in the present. This is also apparent in Le Milieu when the opening narration flatly states the length of the affair, which will be marked throughout the film by intertitles of the date of the action. As mentioned above, the lack of a projective, radical project foredooms Adriana and Paul's affair-

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Want to make love to get back at them?

they are stuck in a normalized present. Paul's technocratic party is the political expression of this bourgeois worldview of a stabilized capitalist hegemony in which time and labor, even love, are strictly measured and rationalized, and the prospect of change on any other terms is outlawed. We might say that the commune, with its collective powers, is better able to escape the present by drawing from a range of personal histories and projecting utopian desires into the future, while the couple is fated to remain mired in a present overdetermined by the imperatives of capital. Yet for both groups-in-formation, a final essential element is imagination. As Stevphen Shukaitis writes in his book Imaginal Machines, Imagination is not ahistorical, derived from nothing, but an on-going relationship and material capacity constituted by social interactions between bodies. Having witnessed the increasingly farcical repetition of symbolic gestures and actions in the waning days of Occupy, I share this priority. These films abound with triumphs and failures of imagination, often forcefully highlighted by repeated techniques of voice-over, fantasy sequence, allusion, and recombination of effects. Actually, nearly all of Tanner's characters are enormously creative, the exceptions mainly symbols of patriarchal bureaucracy (Charles De and Paul Charmoret.) From Le Retour's dreamers of Africa to Messidor's improvisatory nomads, it is more a question of whether the imagination of collective bodies can secure more territory for desire, deterritorializing capitalist structures, or whether they themselves will be captured, their own creativity recuperated and turned against them. Charles' daughter, in her prescription of memorizing a radical aphorism everyday, presents her father with a quote from St. Just: The consciousness of happiness suggests the possibility of another reality. Repeated over a sequence in which Charles is dragged away and transported to a mental hospital, it is clear that his commune was unable to make this leap. The extreme behavior of Charles' bohemian companions- most notably sending his car careening off a cliff- is perhaps a negative expression of an imagination too nihilistic to evade recuperation. Likewise, Pierre and Paul's provocative stunt on a Geneva tram is more

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compensation for their inability to reimagine their methodologies and emotional dispositions in their relationship with Rosemonde than protest. The tribulations of Jonas's communal farm show most clearly this problematic. In its brief duration, the commune is enormously generative of projects, art, and possibilities for a changed sociality. The film's famous mural (and its later reworking by Jonas himself) signifies this imaginative flowering, as do the liberated visions of the fantasy sequences and the experimentation at Mathieu's free school. Many attempts are made to break through established situations with metaphorical gamessausages, ticks, cabbages, onions, even Jonas himself- are deployed to make cognitive leaps. These efforts are never fully successful, but not for lack of trying or material translation. Mathieu's free school folds and the commune is dispersed due to the outside pressures of the law of value and profit, incompatible with the commune's emerging economy of mutual aid beyond measure. Jonas settles on a familiar decision between changing the future through sustained organization, or subverting the present through temporary evasion, but enriches the dichotomy by way of a narrow focus not on movements and revolutions, but on desiring bodies in a single precarious formation. These six films can be initially politically characterized as an ambiguous yet committed celebration of what John Holloway describes as cracking capitalism, referring to a range of actions on a scale from tiny refusals to revolutionary ruptures. There is little to be gained for the contemporary scene if we stop our analysis here- the weak criteria of such an interpretation could say anything or nothing about our situation, or the world Tanner documents. Of course, Tanner is less of a prescriber than of a describer, one who valorizes the kind of microsubversions so important to Holloway in and of themselves. There is a stronger approach we can make after the initial enjoyment of the films, and we need not stop being Marxists to do so. These films can help us think the mystery of the encounter and the antagonistic group subjectivities that struggle to evade capture and build constituent power, whether or not party forms are active or even visible. For his own contemporary audience and for ours, they are an important contribution to a kind of political cinema that removes certain dogmatic blockages and refreshes configurations of power and process. This is ultimately, if we are to take it seriously as political, a politics of descriptive investigation and imaginative potential- and how could such a politics be anything but anti-capitalist and radically egalitarian in the early 21st century?

Le Milieu du monde 1974

Ross Wilbanks
FIRST PART At the heart of Le Milieu du monde is an important question: How does one show an idea with images? A theory? Alain Tanner, in many ways a classic metteur en scne in the middle of the 1970's Political Left, takes a major step with this film. Committing his care of actors and dialogue to the rest of the film apparatus: camera movement, editing, even light: 'I felt very strongly, that it was a little facile to put good revolutionary phrases in the characters' mouths and be satisfied and maybe have a good laugh. So I then decided to shift the work of politics in a film, to

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All our wisdom is but servile prejudice. Our customs but constraint, servitude, and confinement.
put it in the shape of the film rather than the subject matter.' (1) The shape is 112 days in the title's 'Middle of the World' on the watershed divide, assumed to be in a tense space between French and German provinces in Switzerland. An opening narration hangs as a Marxist-koan to the viewer: '...exchange is allowed as long as nothing changes...' Each scene plays flat; none of the charm of discovering Bulle Ogier in La Salamandre, the spirited duo in Messidor, the Noirish trappings of Dans la ville blanche or the touching John Berger vignettes in Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 are to be found in Le Milieu du monde. (2) What this film lacks from the director in previous and future charms it gains as a whole film, where the ideas begin to percolate after one had finished viewing it. Each sequence of scenes has unexpected lengths, scenic shots (with no people) perform mysterious functions along with sparse electronic sounds and odd camera movements cuing, what? Against these potentially alienating effects Tanner directs in a naturalistic style giving the viewer time, adjusting to the physical-filmed-space; it's quotidian ideas and moments. The camera works in tandem with the editing to extend takes that would normally be many shots: talking at a restaurant is followed by a slow wide dolly around the table revealing each character; the talk and respond to talk. This could be shown in a dozen shots in many other films. Shots will hold for longer periods of time but often the camera is still moving even if the characters are not. A dead center drift. The result feels like nothing much is happening but we cannot completely shake the idea that we are being suspended. The traditional way of manipulating is in the editingand this is very funny because it is, in fact, a paradoxwhich gives the impression of reality by completely destroying reality and preventing people from seeing what the camera really sees. This American stylethe sharp cuttinghas been brought to perfection to prevent any kind of dialectics from getting into it. When you don't do it, there is another paradox because there is a very strange feeling of alienation, of distance because you bring time

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and space back into the shot and people have become so much used to the other technique which they think is reality. (3) SECOND PART I still can't tell if I am in the land of exchanges where all the characters seem to do is request favors from one another or perhaps these are merely everyday actions meant to congeal into one big null and isolate our 2 main characters: an engineer who decides to run for office, active and inoffensive and an Italian-immigrant waitress. Their affair could be the only exchange in the whole film in which the retraction at the end serves to reveal again the middle-of-the-world and it's oblique space expressed in those quiet outdoor shots. I'm tempted to go on about these shots but I'm stuck at the thought of their role as a kind of narration. ...

Le Milieu du monde stands in a unique space in narrative construction continuing ideas put forth by Jacques Rivette and informing later film-makers such as 2 time Palm d'Or winner Michael Haneke. Fracturing narrative has been a name-of-thecreativity-game in filmic art for a good half a century but not many have accomplished the breaking up and the redesigning of the pieces without reducing the construct to a puzzle. Le Milieu du monde spreads time and space wide, so it is with some regret that it begins and ends with a voiceover which puts the rhizome-like aura back in the box, rather than back where it belongs, in the soil of open spaces between Vicenza and Moruz (is the subtitled file wrong? do they mean St. Moritz?), Chamoret's hurried ease n'privilege with Adriana's wanting. They both can do as they please.
"What we must do in this black tide," he (Tanner) says, "is swim. We can still do it. People everywhere are making films. People still write, still make musicwe must find the means of resisting. Were like the final hold-outs in enemy occupied territory." (4) NOTES (1) From an interview with James Monaco 'Au milieu du monde: Alain Tanner and Swiss film' reprinted in his piece for Swiss cinema in 'Cinema: A Critical Dictionary' edited by Richard Roud. Full interview: http://parallax-view.org/2012/08/13/au-milieu-du-monde-alain-tanner-and-swiss-film/ (2) In the US, it's difficult to comment on Tanner as an auteur since 60+% of his work is unavailable to us. (3) Interview with James Monaco, 'Au milieu du monde: Alain Tanner and Swiss film' originally for Movietone Full interview: http://parallax-view.org/2012/08/13/au-milieu-du-monde-alain-tanner-and-swiss-film/ (4) Sylvie Groulx's In the Shadow of Hollywood, http://brightlightsfilm.com/34/ shadow.php

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So vegetables are politics now?

Investigating Reality: Character, Idealism, and Political Ideology in Alain Tanners La Salamandre
Joshua Martin
I. Introduction Alain Tanners work during the late 1960s and 1970s offered an alternative look at the politics and radicalism that defined this period of filmmaking. Tanners approach to left wing politics differed significantly from the more abrasive and radical works of Godard-Gorin, Chris Marker, Robert Kramer, et al. that most come to mind when discussing political cinema of this period. Tanner engaged with these matters with an observational eye, preferring to make investigative works that gave a nod to his background in documentaries, while often emphasizing character, particularly the juxtaposition of character types within rather slim narrative constructs. Tanner used this approach to confront the realities of life for radicals and idealists when it no longer seemed possible that revolution would occur. One of the clearest examples of this tendency is visible in Tanners 1971 film La Salamandre starring Bulle Olgier, Jean-Luc Bideau, and Jacques Denis. Forgoing the call to arms and radical formalism of his counterparts, Tanners film tried to understand how leftists and radicals navigate within a country not aligned to their ideas. How do idealists survive in a society that is, in many ways, contrary to their belief systems? This is the fundamental question of many of Tanners film from this period. II. A Juxtaposition of Character Rather than relying on the in your face political discourse and radical ideology of many political films, Tanner took a more subtle approach to navigating the political landscape

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of this period. La Salamandre is about investigation, both in the narrative frame of the film, as well as in the style and tone of the work. Tanner allowed scenes to simply unfold before the camera, remaining formally distant from his subjects and actions. The director either lets the characters speak for him or relies on documentary like narration to further elaborate on ideas. The film largely relied on its characterizations and, mainly, on the juxtaposition between character types to engage with the political and social milieu of late 60s/early 70s Switzerland. Tanner sets up the juxtapositions immediately with his two writers, Pierre (Jean-Luc Bideau) and Paul (Jacques Denis), who though in many ways are ideologically similar, offer distinct variations from each other. Pierre is presented as a somewhat world weary, practical, and cynical journalist whose has taken on the assignment of writing a television script because he needs the money. Paul, on the other hand, is an idealist, a happily married writer who paints houses to earn a living and sings when he is sad. Pierre enlists Paul to help him write the script; Pierre handles the investigative, journalistic part of the writing process, while Paul handles the creative part. Pierre, the practical and cynical journalist, sets out to gather facts and interview the subjects of the real life story which is the basis for their script, while Paul refuses to meet any of the real characters, instead intending to create an idealized portrait of the real Rosemonde, the main character in the real life and fictional drama. As Pierre becomes more involved with Rosemonde, Paul ends up meeting her as well and, after having created his own, idealized version of the character, finds he has to start from scratch, as he can no longer continue in the same vein now that he knows the real Rosemonde. His illusions and idealism about her become shattered and he becomes so fascinated that eventually realizes he is unable to complete the work, as the real world has overwhelmed his fictional one too much for him to go on. Pauls idealism is exhausted by reality. Pierre, on the other hand, seems unable to find the truth in his interviews and talks with Rosemonde, and the closer he gets to her, the less he seems to understand what the story should be. At the same time, he is running out of money and on the verge of eviction. Again, reality invades the fiction. Neither Paul nor Pierre are able to come to terms with their reality vis-a-vis. their hopes and ideals. Each of them become too close to Rosemonde to write about her and lose track of what it is they are writing anyway. Pierres debts eventually catch up with him and he decides to leave Geneva and move to Paris with the not so optimistic prospect of a meager job to at least pay the bills. Paul, meanwhile, returns to painting in order to support himself and his family. In the end, neither Paul nor Pierre can overcome reality, which intrudes upon their lives at every turn. The other important character juxtapositions which Tanner utilizes in La Salamandre are Rosemonde (Bulle Ogier) and everyone else. Rosemonde is the less self-conscious of the three main characters, but, in a way, the most radical of all of them. She seems to be living her life in the way both Paul and Pierre would prefer to live; without caring about what people think about her and quitting jobs whenever she is tired of them. Rosemonde, unlike Paul and Pierre, is unable to verbalize her problems and beliefs. Paul and Pierre seem to be and, perhaps were at one time, politically engaged, while Rosemonde is an outsider living in a society which doesnt look too kindly on outsiders. Rosemondes character exists in contrast to almost everyone around her: it is the character of her uncle, whom she lived with and the question of whether or not she shot him a few years prior, which forms the basis of Paul and Pierres script. Indeed Rosemondes uncle is the complete opposite of her; he represents the old and traditional; he was in the military, is patriotic, regimented, and conservative. He and Rosemonde clash when she lived with him, which culminated in the suspicious shooting incident (he claims she shot him and she claims his gun went off by mistake while he was cleaning it). Rosemonde and her uncle provide Tanner with an opportunity to comment on the generational differences of the period. Rosemonde is young, impulsive, and wants to live freely. Tanner utilizes this old and new mode of living not just between Rosemonde and her uncle, but also between Rosemonde and her employers. When we first meet her, Rosemonde is working at a sausage factory. She is bored and looking for an excuse to quit. One day, she simply stops doing her work and when her boss chastises her, she quits. She was looking for an excuse. She then begins working at a shoe store run by an old-fashioned mother and son, who seem to be constantly annoyed and frustrated by Rosemondes independence and lack of discipline when it comes to her work. Rosemonde constantly butts heads with these two; they accuse her of theft and are suspicious of the way she interacts with customers. One can see the mother and son duo as a representation of mainstream, genteel

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The tenth time therell be a committee. The hundredth time a strike.

Swiss society; a society which cannot comprehend someone like Rosemonde, who lives life differently from them and doesnt conform to the social norms they adhere to. Needless to say, Rosemonde doesnt stay at the shoe store long either. Again, she becomes fed up and begins touching customers in an inappropriate manner; some seem to be into it, but finally someone is outraged, complains, and they fire Rosemonde, which she happily accepts. And the film ends with Rosemonde, having just been fired, wandering the streets, the camera remains largely on her smiling face as she moves between the crowds of people. Tanner seems to end his film on a hopeful tone. He sees Rosemonde as a positive force in society: a person who really is willing to live the way she wants to live, even though she may not be politically active or able to verbalize her disaffection in the way Pierre and Paul are able to, she does as she pleases. She ruffles the feathers of society in ways that Paul and Pierre no longer seem able to; she seems to be closer to living a free life. Though Tanner may not think it is possible for Rosemonde to continue to survive like this, he offers a ray of hope through her character; that after the failures of 68, there are still ways to revolt and disrupt the system. III. Navigating the Political Realties As shown above, Tanner relies on the juxtaposition of various characters and character types in order to present an investigation into the shattered idealism of certain leftists, as well as the portrait of a disaffected young womans alienation from her society. Within this framework, Tanner allows the reality of contemporary life and politics to intrude upon his characters in subtle, yet biting ways. Variously, Paul and Pierre are confronted with the political realities around them. Most tellingly is when an appraiser comes to see Pierre near the end of the film. The appraiser has been sent by Pierres landlord to estimate the worth of Pierres belongings. According to Swiss law at this time, a persons belonging had to equal the amount of delinquent rent; Pierre is several months delinquent on his rent. Within this episode, Tanner is confronting the political and economic reality of Switzerland; a system obviously set up to favor property owners over renters, and at the same time, this is life intruding on the idealism of the two writers. In a telling moment, Paul remarks to the appraiser that his job will be obsolete once private property is abolished. The appraiser has little response to Pauls statement and simply notes that this is unlikely to happen any time soon. Here, our characters are showing

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their ideological hands and then are forced to accept the harshness of political life in Switzerland which conflicts with their beliefs. There are two additional interactions which are worth noting, which Tanner used to great comic effect, as a pointed satire of Swiss society. The most memorable of these being Paul and Pierres joke, which they play on unsuspecting trolley riders in Geneva, with Paul pretending to be an immigrant banging on bongos and singing loudly, while Pierre vents his anger to his fellow passengers about immigrants and how they are a nuisance. Surprisingly, few people on the trolley react to Pierres anger, instead either ignoring or laughing at him. The scene allows for an engagement with the society on dual levels, both commenting on the role of race and immigration in Swiss society, as well the passengers lack of concern or reaction to Swiss anger at immigration. This scene is both funny and a pointed attack on life at the time. Another, similarly comic scene, involves Pierre and a civil servant. The civil servant has arrived at Pierres house to confirm he is in possession of a government issued book, which all citizens are required to keep in their home. When Pierre informs the inspector that he threw the book away long ago, he is surprised to find this is illegal and results in a citation. The absurdity of the scene again emphasizes Tanners view of life and politics in Switzerland. Tanner fills La Salamandre with several such moments, which allow him to comment on the conditions of the world in which he and his characters were living, without hitting the viewer over the head with ideology or political speak. These episodes, however, create a fuller portrait of a group of people trying to come to terms with the loss of idealism, perhaps the death of a cause. Tanner presents his two authors, Paul and Pierre, as idealists attempting to live a life as much outside of the system as possible, trying to forge a life in a society which seems to have little place for them, but he doesnt ever allow the characters or the viewer to forget the political realities of the time. Tanner includes several of these incidences in order to emphasis his characters separation from society, but also to show how individuals, who largely disagree with the policies of their government, navigate in a world they cant relate to; how can they survive without completely abandoning their idealism. IV. Conclusion Tanners La Salamandre can still offer viewers much insight into our own political realities. The film directly engages with the reality radicals or leftists must face once they realize they live under a government they dont agree with. It was not a new problem in the 1960s and 1970s and it is not a problem which has gone away. We can see the parallels to life in 21 st century United States. Leftists and radicals are still required to come to terms with the fact that the society we currently live in seems to have little place for our beliefs or ideas. It is still necessary for leftists and idealists to figure out how to navigate and live within a country where we fundamentally disagree with the way it is run. How do we live, in this reality, without compromising our beliefs and ideals too much? What alternatives can we find within this system? These are questions which Tanner explores in La Salamandre and in his other films from the 1960s and 1970s. These films still remain useful for anyone who feels their society doesnt represent them.

Don't Fuck the Boss!

Ben Webster
A bourgeois man, his declasse mistress, early 1970s French-speaking Europe. To Eric Rohmer in his 1972 L'Amour l'apres-midi they provide the material for moral meditation in the final of his Six Moral Tales. Middle class taste (turtlenecks, a simple yet elegant Parisian office, sexual and emotional restraint) defines the world of protagonist Frdric, and indeed, here as elsewhere, the world of Rohmer's dramatic possibilities. Bourgeois by default, the political and social upheavals of the late 60s register in L'Amour mainly in the variety of eccentric fashions

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We dont have any money, but we have this.

displayed by the women Frdric ogles on the street, and of course in the unrestrained, anarchic personality of would-be mistress Chlo. There is no indication of a return to normal, but rather a sense that nothing had ever happened, aside from the shortening of skirts and bold abandonment of the neck tie. Alain Tanner's Le Milieu du monde (1974) likewise does not dramatize any explicit political struggles. This provincial Switzerland is cold and conservative, and his bourgeois man, despite running for political office, is similarly removed from evident social antagonisms. Yet Le Milieu is a consciously, immanently political film in a way that L'Amour is not- foregrounded above all by the director's interventional voiceovers. Rohmer may hide behind the mysteries of love. Tanner may cynically dismiss them. Yet the odd couples in both films reveal a similar fascination with the interplay of the personal and political in post-'68 Europe, in this instance especially the bearing of class on sexual relations. L'Amour is undoubtably the more widely seen and commented upon film, but after viewing Tanner's masterful work, it is impossible not to group the two works, and to retroactively reread Frdric and Chlo's daliance with and against the torrid affair of Paul and Adriana in Le Milieu. The strategies for evading and engaging material and political conditions in cinema, in such an investigation, become just as important as locating the ethical imperatives issued by these auteurs. "We live like students," Frdric declares in L'Amour, and indeed he and his adorable wife Hlne are a tasteful and understated bourgeois couple, quiet and content in their small world of cutting the pages of books and slightly animated dinner parties. Not like the students who animated the radical upheaval of May '68, however, no, not like those students at all. We even half believe Frdric when he states that the objects of his horny stares are merely "extensions of his wife's beauty." Yet stare he does, pathetically channeling his repression into bizarre fantasies of seducing passersby with a glowing medallion. Later, he will flatly admit that marriage has robbed him of any actual ability to seduce. A petty rebel, Frdric finds pleasure in sticking it to the business world by eating at strange hours, affecting non-sexist relations with his pretty young secretaries, eschewing business attire conventions. From our vantage point in the present,

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we may locate the origins of the current bizarre convergence of political correctness and corporate culture in this pathetic figure. This reading of Frdric is against the grain of Rohmer's intent, one would think. His protagonist is an everyman, tormented by desire, yes, but ultimately decent and, as we shall see, capable of acts of redemption and transcendence. Unlike Tanner's Paul, Frdric commands our sympathy, he suffers quietly, and just as quietly overcomes in a moment of grace. Given the director and trajectory of this cycle of films, it is not surprising the blatantly Catholic overtones. Rohmer is a master of characterization and emotional inflection (rarely is there anything approaching hysteria or rage in his films), and there is real dramatic and ethical heft in his broaching of the universal crises of love, fidelity, desire. These concerns may be left aside for the moment, for a big, brassy woman demands our attention immediately. Enter Chlo, a primal force in blue jeans, pants suit, or baby doll dress (played brilliantly by Zouzou.) From her first entrance, she upsets the unspoken hierarchies in Frdric's little world. The two demure secretaries of the office defer to Frdric's every wish in obedience to the habits of waged labor, responding appropriately to the little flirtations and glances of the boss, because he is the boss, a banal patriarchal relationship par excellence. When Chlo shows up unannounced at his office, Frdric is clearly uneasy at her presence, an attractive woman in the world of commanding businessmen, unbeholden to his whims (decent and restrained as they may be.) He reacts coldly to his old friend's girl, but the sexual frisson is immediately palpable. Not only is Chlo a liberated woman, unabashedly recounting her ability to wield her sexuality for her own ends, she also has forsworn obedience to the capitalist economic order, submitting to wage labor only sporadically and moving from place to place as the spirit takes her. The extended game of seduction she initiates with Frdric is not just a matter of individual morality. It is a strategic struggle of wills between opposing orders, a codified, patriarchal, pseudo-egalitarian consumer capitalism versus the destablizing forces unleashed in the 1960's- feminism, the challenge to waged work, new demands for personal freedoms, critiques of social conformity. Rohmer would seem at times to sense an opening for this interpretation, and cautions against it through character dialogue. Chlo states that she wishes she too was bourgeois, but its easy to decipher a teasing remark from this vulgar, unfettered, confrontational woman. We may characterize her as lumpenbourgeoisie, at best. Some might have regarded the revolting students of '68 in the same terms; it is a subclass that has produced many great anarchists. It is significant in comparing the two films in question to consider the treatment of work and the workplace. Frdric's bourgeois office, his site of command and power, is breached repeatedly by Chlo, who casually occupies it, smoking, sitting on tables, slouching in a chair. In capturing this stronghold, the remainder of the struggle is pre-ordained. Indeed, in a predictable inversion, Frdric verbally commits to adultery with Chlo in the basement of her work place, a modest boutique, a stronghold of the feminine and petty-bourgeois. Le Milieu's Adriana is spotted by her pursuer Paul working as a waitress in a provincial train station cafe, submitting to the small degradations of unwanted touches and verbal harassment by the customers. She is a working-class woman, and on top of that an immigrant, in a workplace openly characterized by humiliating submission to men. Paul, in spite of the gentlemanly nature of his overtures, is hewing to the essential pattern of patriarchal behavior in pursuit of Adriana. Whereas in Rohmer's film the male protagonist is under attack "unjustly," or in a way that upsets the established norms, in Le Milieu Paul is merely following the imperatives of a patriarchal order. It should be noted that while Adriana accepts on her own terms, and is not a simple victim, Tanner takes great pains to underscore the marginality and vulnerability of her position.

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Were moving through empty space.

Paul is a far less likable figure than Frdric, I would argue quite intentionally so, despite showing psychological weakness, flashes of pedestrian decency, etc. For one, we are only once shown his wife, sequestered in a well-appointed Alpine home. He is also involved in the unsavory business of politics, running as a candidate for a bland technocratic law-and-order party of the right. He is an apathetic candidate, drafted solely for his image as a pillar of bourgeois society: a competent manager, family man, native son. The poisonous tension sustaining Le Milieu derives from the systematic revelation of every one of these identities as empty hypocrisy. For who does Paul court at a wayside cafe while he should have been campaigning? Adriana- beautiful but scarred (literally), a working-class immigrant from Italy, with a family history of work place militancy. Unlike Chlo she has no interest in games, but does harbor a deep well of emotional strength with which to navigate Paul's maneuvers. And unlike L'Amour, Tanner does permit flashes of genuine love and affection between the man and his mistress. Rohmer has a real feel and concern for love, but often in his precisely plotted films, the result resembles a game of chess, balanced and strategic. The relationship of Le Milieu suggests an organic realism, yet one haunted by an explosive contradiction, a fatal imbalance emerging from the core of the lovers' subjectivities.

Le Milieu's concluding voiceover obliquely accounts for the end of Paul and Adriana's affair
with a vague humanistic note on diverging lives. An attentive viewer can not miss the real reason, which is immanent in the characters themselves, emerges slowly in the course of their affair, and is brilliantly, forcefully illustrated in the final sequences. En route to a tryst at a swank hotel, Paul rehearses a speech, full of dull platitudes of social cohesion and order. Adriana interrupts him, correcting his conservative nonsense. Later, she refuses to stay the night in such luxury, demanding to be returned to her tiny apartment to make love. The class gap between lovers lies latent while passions run high, even as the power dynamics of their relationship become more apparent. To Paul, once he has seduced Adriana, she is his, forever, and should be brought into the periphery of his false bourgeois world of small luxury and patriarchal "love." His worldview

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is blindly positivist, naive yet iron in its enforcement of normality. Indeed, we find some coincidence between the worldviews of the character Paul and the director Rohmer. Unfortunately, Paul is character not creator, and reacts with incredulity when Adriana tires of his narcissism and hypocrisy. Even as their trysts become an open secret around town, Paul continues to campaign, much to the dismay of the party bosses.

On the morrow of his defeat, Paul retreats to Adriana, expecting consoling and more besides. He is shocked when Adriana shortly announces her departure, given the death of the cafe owner. What is the motivation of her decision, her decisive break with her lover? Significantly, it comes on the heels of a work place change- a familiar lever of working class decision, as she had noted earlier regarding her own family history. Registering as well is a certain disgust with Paul's casual disregard of his election loss- a reaffirming of his trivial engagement with the world, of the hypocritical gap between the speeches he can convincingly deliver and the reality of his single-minded desires. It is a masterfully ambiguous moment in the narrative by Tanner; by allowing space for the mysteries of individual agency, we approach the power of Rohmer's storytelling. Or, I propose, Tanner draws explicit attention to the embodiment of the contradictions of capitalism in Paul and Adriana's affair, but, like these contradictions writ large, one never knows where, when, and how they will resolve, explode, or be displaced. When the didactic thrust of the film resumes and drives it to conclusion, the political meaning crystallizes in a pair of matching scenes detailing the lives, post-affair, of the couple. Paul is back at work, surveying the workings of his factory in technical dress and authoritative demeanor. We then see Adriana at work in a factory in another city. Walking down the aisle is a supervisor, in dress and demeanor nearly identical to Paul as he was just shown. After the brief, unsustainable illusion of sexual dalliance, Paul and Adriana have returned to their essential lots in life: privilege and authority for the former, alienation and exploitation for the latter. Although Adriana may be seen to have conducted the affair of her own volition, for her own ends, she ultimately returns to her structurally imposed position as an immigrant working-class woman. She has been sleeping with the boss, an embodiment of the ruling class if not the same individual. Paul, pleasure won if broken-hearted, appears to have lost little. Like Frdric, he can safely return to the bourgeois bosom after dipping his feet in the exhilerating waters of another Europe. From the fate of the couples in these parallel narratives, we have distinct injunctions issued to their respective protagonists. "Don't fuck!" Frdric is commanded by his moral tale. Adriana is made to understand a supplemented proscription, "Don't fuck the boss!" *** The salience of Frdric's proscription in the contemporary zeitgeist is most aptly seen in the Hollywood reinterpretation of L'Amour l'apres-midi as the 2007 Chris Rock vehicle I Think I Love My Wife. We should not hold our breath for a multiplex release of I Think I Hate My Class Enemy, but return instead to our initial situating of the two films in the context of early70's Europe. It is a period described by Tanner in Le Milieu's voiceover as "normalization;" Alain Badiou has described the movement more colorfully as the "Restoration." Within this retrenchment of the established order, post the upheaval of the 1960s, two general trends may be identified. First, the beating back of radical groups and social movements, a process more successful in some places than others. Notably, the 1970's saw an intensification, not diminishing,

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of struggle in Italy- an enticing point of significance in Le Milieu, which dramatizes the emigration of class-conscious Italian Adriana to the more pacified nation of Switzerland. Second, the recuperation and integration of oppositional cultural and social formations into the circulation of capitalism- both in the fulfillment of certain moderate demands, and in the proliferation of commodifiable identities, especially youth subcultures. Is there not a certain odor of this hanging about L'Amour, with its veneer of risque fashion and new sexual sensibilities, but absolute avoidance of the political? Tanner's work of the decade is dominated by the theme of 60s subjectivities cut adrift in the normalization of the 70s, in the demoralizing return of business as usual. "What now?" is the implicit question dominating the drama of nearly every character. Note, for instance, the unresolved fate of Adriana at the conclusion of Le Milieu, in contrast to the happy return of Frdric to the timeless, unchanging family unit in L'Amour. Le milieu thematizes normalization in more formal ways as well. Calendar date intertitles precede most scenes, a reminder both of the historical specificity of the moment, and the ever increasing distance from the event of '68, the grinding dead time of depoliticized existence, the time of work and capital accumulation. There is also a potent visual trope of a Swiss country field, alternatively fallow in winter and sun-splashed in summer. The symbolic gesture towards the immense power of change on a place and people is self-evident. Finally, the materialist marking at the film's onset, acknowledging both in mise en scene and voiceover the materiality of the film as situated artistic intervention and commodity, as product of a specific place and time. Where then does that leave us to consider L'Amour in the context of normalization? I argue above for a reading of Chlo as an embodiment of some of the oppositional movements of the 60s, but in the form of a sexual predator that rationalizes her to an extent in Rohmer's ahistorical worldview. Rohmer does obliquely acknowledge the antagonisms of preceding years, but not the process of normalization. Rather, what appears on the surface of his film is recuperated debris of a capitalist counteroffensive, namely sexual mores, fashion, etc. As an aside, it is fascinating to review in Rohmer's work post L'Amour numerous commendable period films that reveal a keen appreciation for the subtleties of history- be it in the stylized Medievalism of Perceval, or the perceptive Popular Front spy thriller Triple Agent. If only we could all be like Frdric, and only have to furrow our brows to consider the singular quandary of whether or not to keep our pants on.

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2012

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