The buried treasures of Swiss cinema

This year’s Locarno Film Festival, which ended on Saturday, was also an opportunity to rediscover some gems of Swiss cinema that had fallen into oblivion. Pierre Jendrysiak, a French film critic and lecturer in film studies at the University of Lille, reflects on two of them. If Swiss cinema is a treasure, it is a buried treasure. It is too often hidden, forgotten and underestimated, and even its greatest filmmakers – Alain Tanner in particular – are often unknown to film buffs. For this reason, the Cinémathèque Suisse, a long-standing collaborator of the Locarno Film Festival, proposed this year to rediscover two recently digitally restored films, presented in the festival’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma section: Repérages (Faces of Love) (1977) by Michel Soutter, one of the members of Groupe 5, which brought together some of the greatest Swiss filmmakers of the 1960s, and L’Allégement (The Unburdening)(1983), the first feature film by Marcel Schüpbach, who made only three feature-length ...