https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220911-swiss-filmmaker-alain-tanner-dies-at-92

Geneva (AFP) – Prolific Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner, considered a pioneer of Switzerland's new wave film movement, died Sunday at the age of 92, his foundation said.

ADVERTISING
"Alain Tanner was one of the beacons of Swiss cinema," his foundation said in a statement issued in consultation with his family.

Tanner was an internationally renowned director with more than two dozen films to his name, who began his career in the late 1950s.

A contemporary of the French New Wave, he is credited with helping launch Switzerland's own, smaller new wave in the 1970s, along with colleagues Miche Soutter, Claude Goretta, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange.

Their "Group of 5" spurred a renewal in Swiss films reflecting the era's spirit of nonconformity.

Tanner's first full-length feature film, "Charles, Dead or Alive", which appeared in 1969, marked the beginning of politically engaged cinema in Switzerland.

That film, which tells the story of a businessman who decides to abandon mainstream capitalist life to take up a marginal existence on the fringe of society as student protests rage, won the top prize at the Locarono film festival.

Among his best-known films are "Jonas who will be 25 in the Year 2000," from 1976 and "Light Years Away", which won the Grand Prix at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival.

On his foundation's website, he is quoted as saying he felt lucky to have been born when he was.

"Over 50 years, during the second half of the last century, I lived through was probably the most engaging for cinema, with the questioning of the old styles, the break with old structures and the arrival of modernity," he said.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/legendary-swiss-filmmaker-alain-tanner-dies-aged-92/47892184?utm_campaign=teaser-in-querylist&utm_source=swissinfoch&utm_medium=display&utm_content=o#:~:text=The%20Geneva%20director%20Alain%20Tanner,bearing%20his%20name%20has%20announced.
(another obit)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0849609/?ref_=tt_ov_dr
(his filmography)

About "Jonah...":

"The European equivalent of 'The Return of the Secaucus 7,' this Swiss film looks at the lives of several men and women in their 30s as they confront the slim gains of the 'revolutionary' sixties. Max, a dissatisfied copy editor; Myriam, a redhead into tantric sex; and Marie, a supermarket checker who gives unauthorized discounts to the elderly, search for renewed meaning on a communal farm..."

(John Sayles' "Return of the Secaucus 7" has been called the inspiration for the later, yuppie-version "The Big Chill," but director Lawrence Kasdan denies ever seeing RotS7. In both American movies, btw, the characters are college graduates.)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074718/reviews?ref_=tt_ov_rt
(user reviews of "Jonah" - do read at least a few of them!)

https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch/?sort=user_rating&explore=title_type&role=nm0849609&ref_=nm_flmg_shw_3
(his films, listed according to popularity)

Presume and certainly hope the cinematically fictive Jonah has survived; if so, he's 46 or 47 today, and had better steer clear of not merely those hungry sharks we've been reading about of late, but especially any "Great Fish" of Biblical proportions. (Though I doubt something only on the scale[s] of a trout would be a threat.]

Oh, and it was lyrically sterling how the late great Johnny Mercer name-checked the Old Testament whale tale in--with scriptural imprecision maybe but immaculate rhymes--"Accentuate the Positive", a simply terrific tune from start to finish which not merely became an American standard after Bing Crosby's huge radio hit SET the standard, but ALSO a minor one by its very author (and with Jo Stafford's Pied Pipers as chorus). Oh, and FURTHER, the matchless track has the distinction of playing over the credits of one of the finest American crime dramas since "The Maltese Falcon" (or at least "Chinatown").

I allude there Curtis Hansen's sweepingly superb "L..A. Confidential", a rare instance where Hollywood's refracted retelling of a fine novel significantly surpasses its source material.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida