The beginnings
The first Swiss screening took place at the National Exhibition in Geneva in 1896, under the initiative of Auguste and Louis Lumière. The first movie theaters in Switzerland followed at the beginning of the 20th century. From the silent era until the 1920s, Swiss productions were rare and the country was used more as a backdrop for directors from other countries, for its mountainous views and lakes. The 1920s brought the creation of studios in several cities in French-speaking Switzerland, including Geneva. It was also the period when the actor Michel Simon made his debut. Michel Simon was born in 1895 in Geneva. He left for Paris at a very early age, but was soon called back to Switzerland at the time of the First World War. During a leave, he fell under the spell of the performance of the actor Georges Pitoëff in the play Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen. He joined his company, which moved to Paris in 1922. There he began a brilliant career as an actor. But it is the cinema that made him famous to the public, including his roles in La Chienne (1931) and Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932), Drôle de drame (1937) or in Le Vieil Homme et l'enfant by Claude Berri (1966). The transition to the very expensive sound film industry put a stop to French-speaking cinema, making it almost non-existent throughout the 1930s. In the early 1950s, Alain Tanner (born in Geneva in 1929) founded the Geneva University Film Club with the famous Swiss director Claude Goretta. Tanner and Goretta then went to London to study film at the British Film Institute. In 1957, the two directors made their first film, Nice Time (Piccadilly by night). The following decade, Tanner founded the Swiss Directors' Association and made several short films.
The New Wave
From the 1960s through to the 1980s, French-speaking Switzerland followed the Nouvelle Vague movement (a genre opposed to traditional cinema, moving towards a cinema closer to reality, in both aesthetics and direction) in contrast to German-speaking Switzerland, which produced more documentaries. The pioneer of this movement, Jean-Luc Godard, passed through Geneva for his film Le Petit Soldat (1960, the same year as the legendary À bout de souffle). The film takes in famous Geneva locations such as the boulevards Helvétique and Jaques-Dalcroze, the Place de Neuve and the Promenade Saint-Antoine. The Franco-Swiss director had already passed through the city in 1955, during the shooting of his short film Une femme coquette (which features the Pont de la Machine). The 1960s also saw the return of Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta to Geneva. Both directors were hired by Télévision Suisse Romande (TSR), as was Michel Soutter. Born in Geneva in 1932, Soutter made his first film in 1966, La Lune avec les dents. This was followed by Les Arpenteurs (1971), L'Escapade (1972) and Repérages (1977). Michel Soutter was also the initiator of Groupe 5, a structure made up of Swiss filmmakers who relied on Swiss Television's pre-purchase of a cinema-format film. This process not only enabled him to raise the funds needed to carry out his projects, but also promoted the distribution of Swiss cinema. Alain Tanner, for his part, gained renown with works such as La Salamandre (1971) and Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (1976), both of which immerse the viewer in the struggles of proletarians prey to the disillusions inspired by capitalist society. In 1981, his film Les Années lumière won the Jury's Special Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Nowadays
In the early 2000s, there were three main genres in Swiss cinema: art house, mainstream and documentary. In this last category, we note a very fine feature film shot in French-speaking Switzerland: Exit, le droit de mourir by Fernand Melgar. This 2005 documentary follows the Exit association, which has been providing assisted suicide in Switzerland since 1982. The film won the Best Documentary prize at the Swiss Film Festival and was acclaimed by European critics. In 2008, Melgar directed another successful documentary, La Forteresse, which won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. On the fiction front, Geneva-based director Léa Fazer stands out with Bienvenue chez les Suisses (2004, filmed partly in her hometown), Notre univers impitoyable (2008, with Alice Taglioni, Jocelyn Quivrin and Thierry Lermitte), Ensemble, c'est trop (2010), Cookie (2013) and Maestro (2014, with Pio Marmaï and Michael Lonsdale). More recently, Fazer directed the TV movies Mystère place Vendôme (2017) and Mystère à la Sorbonne (2018) for France 2. In terms of events, Geneva's Grütli cinemas host a number of festivals, including the FIFDH (Festival du Film et Forum sur les droits humains), Black Movie (an international independent film festival dedicated to auteur cinema) and Everybody's Perfect (a festival rewarding LGBTQI+ works). In 2020, director Virgil Vernier filmed a night of drinking among Geneva's golden youth in Sapphire Crystal.
Internationally
A number of international films have passed through French-speaking Switzerland, and Geneva in particular. Among the best-known are Philip Kaufman's L'Insoutenable Légèreté de l'être (1988) (with the excellent Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche) and Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski's Rouge. This third installment in the Trois couleurs feature film series (the first two were Bleu and Blanc), starring Irène Jacob and Jean-Louis Trintignant, earned three nominations at the world's most prestigious festivals (Golden Globes, Oscars and the Cannes Film Festival). The early 2000s brought to Geneva the filming of L'Adversaire (2002, Nicole Garcia), Après vous (2003, by Pierre Salvadori with Daniel Auteuil) and Commis d'office (2009, Hannelore Cayre). The 2010s see Belle du Seigneur (2011, Glenio Bondir), Commis d'office (2012, the third film in which André Dussolier and Catherine Frot reprise their roles as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford) and Sean Penn's The Last Face (2016). The film finished shooting in Geneva, passing through the Palais Wilson, headquarters of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The Deal series, scheduled for release in 2025, focuses on the behind-the-scenes aspects of the Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015. Filming took place on the shores of Lake Geneva, highlighting the Geneva landscape.
