All Power to the Imagination! // alain tanner event
The Salamander / La Salamandre
France | 1971 | b&w | 124 mins | dir. Alain Tanner, with Bulle Ogier, Jean-Luc Bideau, Jacques Denis La Salamandre is one of three films Tanner made in the seventies in collaboration with novelist, art critic and writer of polemical nonfiction John Berger. A journalist recruits a novelist friend to help him write a TV script based on a news item in a local paper about a man who accused his niece of shooting and wounding him. She claimed the gun went off while he was cleaning it; eventually dropped for lack of evidence, the case was never resolved. The novelist sets out to create the script from imagination, while the journalist goes after the facts, but the truth of the incident – and of the character of the young woman (the 'salamandre' of the film's title) - eludes them both.
