With winter upon us, we turn to the surreal work of Swiss filmmaker Marcel Schüpbach, whose breakout film L’Allégement earned him the Grand Prize of the Youth Jury at the Locarno Film Festival in 1983. Haunting and beautiful, Schüpbach’s film calls back to an earlier style of filmmaking, blending the look of 1950s studio melodramas with a puzzle-like plot that recalls the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Set in the wintry landscapes of rural Switzerland, L’Allégement concerns a young country nurse whose passionate love affairs put her at odds with her great grandmother. Shot with pointed expressionism, Schüpbach’s film distills its narrative in a series of evocative moments — heartfelt kisses, heated staredowns and crazed sprints across snowy expanses.

“L’Allégement is the story of a passion that I wanted to be universal. So I chose to make a film that was somewhat “timeless” and to banish all naturalism. Hence the lack of dialogue, the use of black and white, the post-synchronized sound, and the original music. When it was released more than forty years ago, the film was completely out of fashion. That is probably why it is still relevant today.” MARCEL SCHÜPBACH

Though made in the ‘80s, L’Allégement has much more in common with earlier forms of filmmaking, prefiguring the work of such directors as Guy Maddin who have found inspiration in early cinema. With its incisive dialogue and calculated camerawork, it showcases a preternatural understanding of form from a filmmaker who was just getting his start making films.

Marcel Schüpbach was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1950. While he studied literature in college, he’d already started making short experimental films in his teens. He directed his first professional short film, Murmure, in 1971. After directing L’Allégement, he made a couple more fiction films before pivoting to documentary filmmaking. These later works include Carla’s List (2006), about the Chief Prosecutor at the Yugoslavia War Crimes Tribunal, and Les Hommes du tunnel, about miners involved in the construction of a massive tunnel in the Alps.

Text written by Nicolas Pedreoro-Setzer. Special thanks to Marcel Schüpbach and Cinémathèque Suisse.