In the 1949 film The Third Man, Orson Welles’s character Harry Lime claimed that 500 years of peace and democracy in Switzerland had produced nothing more notable than the cuckoo clock.
The Swiss director Alain Tanner may well have had the quote in mind when 20 years later he began making feature films that he described as an attempt to arouse “a smug nation drowsed by a facile ideology of neutrality”.
He largely succeeded, too, challenging what he saw as the anodyne conformity of bourgeois Swiss culture with a series of radical movies that bore the influence of Bertolt Brecht as well as French new wave cinema and dealt with zeitgeist themes of rebellion, alienation and alternative lifestyles.
When The Third Man hit cinema
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