Léopold Lindtberg and Jean-Luc Godard
National cinema really took off in the 1940s with Léopold Lindtberg's first humanist feature, La Dernière Chance (1945, Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival). This Viennese émigré was Switzerland's first major film director. He won the Oscar for best screenplay for Marie-Louise and the Oscar for best original story in 1948 for The Search. In 1955, he had the honor of being a member of the jury at Cannes.
Jean-Luc Godard was born of Swiss parents in Paris, but grew up in Nyon, in the canton of Vaud. He made his first short films in Switzerland, before returning to France, where he became a leader of the Nouvelle Vague. His breakthrough came with À bout de souffle (Breathless) in 1959, and the early part of the following decade marked his consecration: Bande à part, Pierrot le fou, Le Mépris ... After meeting Anne Wiazemski in the mid-1960s, he became involved in student activism. The result was La Chinoise (1967). In the same year, he made Camera Eye, a short film that was part of Chris Marker's Loin du Vietnam project. Godard's left-wing leanings became more and more radical, until in 1968 he decided to give up cinema as he had been practicing it. Like Chris Marker, he committed himself to making ciné-tracts and Le Gai Savoir, a didactic film that was censored on its release. That same year, he lobbied the leading figures of the French New Wave to cancel the Cannes Film Festival in support of the students, and founded the Dziga Vertov group with Jean-Pierre Gorin. Godard continued his political commitment with Un film comme les autres, shot in a factory and featuring discussions between workers and students. Following a serious motorcycle accident in 1971, he became close to a leading figure in Swiss cinema, Anne-Marie Miéville. She became his close collaborator for several decades, co-directing with him for both the small and big screens(Ici et ailleurs ; Deux fois cinquante ans de cinéma français ; The Old Place). Godard remained prolific thereafter, making a succession of feature-length and short films, sometimes in experimental forms. He died on September 13, 2022 in Rolle, Switzerland, by assisted suicide, legislation permitting this under certain conditions.
Swiss directors on the international scene
On the international scene, Swiss cinema is well represented by Alain Tanner, Claude Goretta and Michel Soutter. Together with Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange, they founded the Groupe des cinq in 1968 to encourage young Swiss cinema. Barbet Schroeder, nominated for a Best Director Oscar for Le Mystère Von Bülow , is at home in both fiction and documentary. In 2023, he directed Ricardo et la peinture , a portrait of the painter Ricardo Cavallo.
In recent years, Swiss cinema has seen the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers. These include Jean-Stéphane Bron, one of the most promising filmmakers of the moment, known for his political documentaries such as Cleveland vs. Wall Street (2010), and Stefan Haupt, a Zurich-born filmmaker who made a name for himself with his film Le Cercle, which won Best Documentary at the Berlinale in 2014. In 2016, the Franco-Swiss animated film Ma vie de zucchini, directed by Claude Barra, won two Césars.
Great performers
Ursula Andress is perhaps Switzerland's greatest actress. She appeared in numerous Italian and French films throughout her career. Most notably Soleil rouge (1971), in which she starred alongside Alain Delon, Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune. Winner of the Golden Globes in 1963 for her role in 007 vs. Doctor No, she finally gained international recognition. She is also the only James Bond girl to appear in person in one of Fleming's novels(On Her Majesty's Service).
Bruno Ganz is a famous Swiss actor. His masterful portrayal of a fading Hitler in The Fall (2004) is well known, as is his role as Damiel in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987) and its sequel, So Far, So Close (1993). He acted for some of the greats, including Ridley Scott in Cartel (2008), and in one of his last roles before his death, he played Lars von Trier's Verge in The House that Jack Built (2018).
Festivals and the international opening
Locarno's most eagerly-awaited film festival is, of course, the Locarno International Film Festival. Founded in 1946, its vocation is to showcase new trends, currents and filmmakers, while promoting auteur cinema and artistic quality. The Piazza Grande is the festival's emblematic venue. Some films are screened there in the open air on a very large screen. The main prize awarded by the jury is the Golden Leopard.
The Visions du réel festival in Nyon is dedicated to documentary films, and is Switzerland's second-largest festival. Founded in 1969, the festival has always been open to documentaries from the four corners of the globe. Also in 1969,On Her Majesty's Secret Service ( Au service secret de Sa Majesté ), shot mainly in Switzerland, remains a benchmark for fans of the famous James Bond agent. The sequences shot in the exceptional surroundings of Grindelwald and the impressive ski descent in the Lauterbrunnen have a lot to do with it. But the most emblematic location of the shoot was Piz Gloria, the futuristic revolving restaurant perched at an altitude of 2970 meters on the Schilthorn.
Switzerland has also played host to a number of major productions over the past decade, from Olivier Assayas' Sils Maria to Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, Kenneth Brannagh's The Crime of the Orient Express and Paolo Sorrentino's Youth (which also shot The Consequences of Love in Lugano).
The Head and the Ecal, breeding grounds for emerging filmmakers
Switzerland also boasts two of Europe's top film schools: the documentary-oriented HEAD in Geneva, and the Ecal in Lausanne, on the other side of Lake Geneva. Among the emerging figures from these schools are two recent graduates: Lou Rambert Preiss, from the Ecal cinema section's class of 2018, who directed the short film Ici le chemin des ânes (Here the donkeys' path), which was noticed during its festival tour (Locarno, Côté court), or June Balthazard, who graduated from HEAD's master cinema program in 2015 and, after joining Le Fresnoy, was exhibited at the Taipei Biennial.
