Charles Dead or Alive

Like The Salamander, Tanner's first feature takes one person's life and examines it within an environment of ideas as much as within a physical one. Charles is a rich industrialist in complacent old Switzerland who reaches a crisis point in his life - one marked by a TV interview he gives - and walks out. He settles in with a youngish couple (she the daughter of a judge, he a sign painter), and his daughter, a member of a revolutionary student group, visits them. It's an isolated community, at odds with society at large, 'caught in a structure' as Charles says, 'that they can't accept'. As in The Salamander, Tanner uses the mechanics of New Wave film-making, but freshly, and is close enough to the unheroic realities of daily life in sad, materialistic, authoritarian Europe to make his film a rewarding experience.