Kurt Gloor(1942-1997)

Kurt Gloor was one the very few truly unique Swiss film directors. Born in 1942 in Zurich, he studied art and graphics in Zurich and later worked as an assistant cameraman for advertisement films. At the same time, Gloor, who believed in the revolutionary force of film, created a couple of short movies in which already his most characteristic topics appear: the loneliness of urban life, the subjugation of women, the old and the children, the fragile status of mountain farmers, the governmental suppression of drug addicts, the controversial methods of psychiatry, etc. In his first feature length movie, "Die plötzliche Einsamkeit des Konrad Steiner/The Sudden Loneliness of Konrad Steiner" (1976, Gloor portrayed the 75 years old shoemaker Steiner, whose wife has died and whose apartment and working place have been canceled. Since Steiner refuses to go to an assistant living home, the Swiss government sends the young and attractive social worker Claudia, with whom Steiner falls in love and starts his struggle against the governmental suppression of old people. In Gloors "Der Erfinder/The Inventor" (1981), Bruno Ganz plays Jakob Nüssli who invented a car that already exists. This movie is a monumental for all those people who do not have the luck to be mentioned in a lexicon, but who had a good idea at the wrong time. To what extent Kurt Gloor was such an inventor himself, is not quite clear, but he took his own life on September 20th 1997 in Zurich.