A panorama of Swiss fantasy cinema
Although the fantastic genre only comprises a small portion of Swiss film history, it nevertheless represents a genuinely diverse and original aspect of the art. Film after film or through a cross-section, it has been the research ground of Swiss film-makers.
Without doubt, Daniel Schmid was the Swiss film-maker who explored this terrain most often and with the most skill. In his second feature-length film, La Paloma (1974), he puts on film the dramatic love story of Isidore and Viola, like a voluptuous, baroque, photonovel a collection of clichés which are both vulgar and sophisticated, putting farce and sentiment side by side. More explicitly fantastic, Jenatsch (1987) follows the enquiries of a journalist who is obsessed by a revolutionary from the Grisons. Ravaged by visions, he slowly loses it and ends up in a sort of 4th dimension, a passage to the 17th century. But Schmid also knows how to handle humour, calm and reverie, such as in Hors Saison (1992), where the narrator, returning to a hotel where he spent his childhood, finds the people unchanged and living in the same surroundings. Imagination, enchantments, split personalities, flashbacks. Majestically treated by Schmid, these themes inspired many of his compatriots.
Fredi Murer produced a film in 1969 on “the Switzerland of tomorrow” requested by the Banque Populaire Suisse. 2069 following an alien explorer – created by H.R. Giger –, his helmet-shell has a camera fixed on it. A silent witness, half sleep-walker, he records from a distance the last convulsions of a perfect society, concrete, ultra-controlling, barely disturbing a few outcasts and finally destroyed by a mysterious disaster. Ten years later, with Grauzone, Murer drives in the nail.
In his Histoire du cinéma suisse, Hervé Dumont sees in “a curious band of non-conformist science-fiction” – L’inconnu de Shandigor by Jean-Louis Roy (1967) – a film which forms the turning point between “commercial production and that of a rising writer”.
Clemens Klopfenstein never hesitated to describe the beyond in Macao (1988). And the vision of death he presents is idyllic, or nearly, that of a truly heavenly island, its only fault being that it is difficult to leave. Three years earlier, his happy fantasy had already defied general concern to produce Der Ruf der Sybilla, perhaps the only authentically marvellous Swiss film, where a magic drink makes dreams come true and where, on dying, the main characters turn into trees.
Since the 1990s, newcomers, have progressively occupied the centre stage. Some of them continue in the aesthetic tradition of restraint and austerity, while others develop more spectacular approaches, encouraged in particular by the development of digital technologies.
A vast field of possibilities is open to Swiss film-makers today. The brief period between 2004 and 2007 alone saw the emergence of new types of film. In Karim Patwa’s Spaceship (2004), Karim Patwa delivered an attempt at geneology as well as an eccentric science fiction film; in 2005, Clemens Klopfenstein’s last production, Die Vogelpredigt, blended myth and derision, the grotesque with the sublime; a big success in 2006, Mein Name ist Eugen, a rites of passage tale by Micheal Steiner, was studded with fairytale touches; while with I Was a Swiss Banker (2007), Thomas Imbach recently attempted an experimental and frankly nebulous fairytale; finally, the opening film of the Journées de Soleure, 2006, Marmorera – a supernatural thriller based on a curse – solidified Markus Fischer’s long-standing interest in the genre. This growing diversity was confirmed by the mushrooming growth in short-length fantastic features produced each year all over the country, so we can see that through cinema, Switzerland can continue to question itself, as well as diversifying.
The complete version of this text is available on the French version of this website.