CLAUDE GORETTA

(23 June 1929 - 20 February 2019)

The Swiss-born film writer and director Claude Goretta, who has died of natural causes at the age of 89, admitted that he never studied film formally but learned the art of the cinema just by watching good films. He founded the Geneva University film society and was a film reviewer for Swiss newspapers. With four other directors, Jean-Jacques Lagrange, Jean-Louis Roy, Michel Soutter and Alain Tanner, he formed the production company Groupe 5, in order to get funding from Swiss TV for their own cinema films. In the 1950s he and Tanner worked at the BFI in London, doing subtitling and archive work. The BFI Experimental Film Fund then sponsored their short and wordless documentary Nice Time, about life around Piccadilly Circus at night. Goretta subsequently joined Swiss Television and from 1957 made shorts and documentaries. Much of his work was politically and socially motivated, carrying an edge not always appreciated by his Swiss compatriots. The first feature film that he wrote, produced and directed was The Madman (Le fou) in 1970, with François Simon, followed by The Invitation (Academy Award nominated), The Wonderful Crook (with Gérard Depardieu) and then The Lacemaker, which made his name worldwide. It starred a young Isabelle Huppert as a reserved girl battling with her emotions. The part won her a Bafta for most promising newcomer. The Wedding Day was based on a Maupassant novel, La Provinciale had Nathalie Baye as a girl moving to Paris to seek her fortune (and Bruno Ganz along the way) and The Death of Mario Ricci starred Gian Maria Volontè as a journalist investigating the death of a labourer working on the Mont Blanc tunnel. In 1985 Goretta adapted Monteverdi’s opera for his film of Orfeo. Other films that he wrote and directed include If the Sun Never Returns, Enemies of the Mafia and L’ombre, with Jacques Perrin, which was his last film for the cinema in 1992. He carried on working on television movies including episodes of Maigret with Bruno Cremer and his final work was on a TV biography of Jean-Paul Sartre in 2006.

MICHAEL DARVELL