Ailleurs et ici

Alain Klarer’s contribution is about the difficult relationship which Swiss film-makers had and still have with Swiss reality. Klarer uses as Leitmotif in his films withdrawal into oneself and the desire for what is strange and different behind the mountains. He tries to use this to explain the ‘escape into work’ of the average Swiss person. Before the sixties, everyday reality was hardly ever tackled in film; subjects were taken from myths, folklore and patriotic legend. Wilhelm Tell (1921) by Rudolf Walther Fein and Heidi (1952) by Luigi Comencini are examples of heroic and idyllic distortions in Swiss cinema. Film-makers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Clemens Klopfenstein, Daniel Schmid, Michel Soutter and Alain Tanner have led to the drastic re-assessment of this image and its virtual reversal. These film-makers have sketched a Switzerland which is emotionally uninhabitable and i which they lived as refugees in their own country with a burning desire for ‘elsewhere’.Alain Klarer (1949, Neuchâtel) studied ethnology and later directing at the London Film School. He has worked as photographer, also in the United States. Klarer was assistant to e.g. Tanner, Seiler and Dindo.