Reisender Krieger

In the search for the one true Swiss road movie, Christian Schocher’s Reisender Krieger (“The Traveling Warrior”) of 1981 is the only choice. Everything about it was visionary: the direction, the camera work, the use of amateur actors, and the screenplay based on Homer’s Odyssey. A sales representative named Krieger, working for a cosmetics brand, sets off in his Citroën CX car on an odyssey across 1970s Switzerland—a country in a state of upheaval and decline. The camera revels in parking lots, construction cranes and vast concrete structure, farms, hair salons, discotheques, motorway service plazas, cheap hotel rooms, and dim bars.

This book transfers Reisender Krieger, shot in 16 mm-format, into a photo book featuring some 180 carefully scanned still frames. A conversation with director Christian Schocher and cameraman Clemens Klopfenstein, as well as an essay by Swiss writer Zora del Buono, round off this volume, making it a unique document of a Switzerland long gone that still captivates us today, very much in the spirit of Swiss-born Robert Frank’s famous The Americans.