Peter Mettler

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Peter Mettler
Peter Mettler, 2013
Born
Peter Mark Mettler

(1958-09-07) September 7, 1958 (age 65)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation(s)Film director
Cinematographer
Photographer
Years active1976–present

Peter Mettler (born September 7, 1958) is a Swiss-Canadian film director and cinematographer.[1] He is best known for his unique, intuitive approach to documentary, evinced by such films as Picture of Light (1994), Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002), and The End of Time (2012). "His peripatetic lens is ever gravitating toward outsiders in search of ecstatic states", writes José Teodoro in Brick, "strange spectacles that defy straightforward documentation, and sacred places that promise some metaphysical deliverance. There are precedents for his methodologies—the films of Chris Marker and Werner Herzog come to mind—but Mettler’s gifts as an open and unobtrusive interviewer and his capacity to discover shared sensibilities between people of vastly diverse cultures and creeds feels singular."[2]

Mettler has worked as a cinematographer on films by Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, Bruce McDonald, and Jennifer Baichwal, and has collaborated with numerous other artists, including Michael Ondaatje, Fred Frith, Jim O'Rourke, Jane Siberry, Robert Lepage, Edward Burtynsky, Greg Hermanovic, Richie Hawtin, Neil Young, Jeremy Narby, Franz Treichler and Emma Davie. Since 2005, Mettler has extended his artistic practice to the realm of live digital image-mixing, collaborating with a diverse array of musicians, dancers, poets, and multimedia artists in a wide range of locales, from theatres and cinemas to dance clubs and wilderness retreats.

Mettler was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in the 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.

Early life

Mettler was born in 1958 in Toronto, Ontario, where he was raised. His parents were Swiss immigrants. He made his first films at the age of sixteen before studying cinema at

Ryerson Polytechnical Institute
(1977-1982). While Mettler was at Ryerson, he spent summers loading cargo onto airplanes in Zürich. In the midst of his studies he took a year off to work at a heroin rehabilitation home in a repurposed twelfth-century Swiss monastery.

Career

Scissere

Mettler's transformative experience at the heroin rehabilitation home provided the inspiration for his first feature Scissere (1982), "a narrative film that feels like an experimental piece, a collage of micro-tales of schizophrenia, addiction, study, and solitude",[3] which he dedicated to Bruno Sciessere, one of the facility's patients. Scissere was the first student film included in the Toronto International Film Festival (formerly known as the Festival of Festivals), and received the Norman McLaren Award for Best Canadian Student Film.[4]

Eastern Avenue

Mettler followed Scissere with Eastern Avenue (1985), an intuitive travelogue diary: a form that would become a hallmark of his filmmaking style. With stops in Switzerland, Germany and Portugal, "the film presents a freely flowing series of impulsive, impressionistic images: urban and rural, artificial and natural".[5] Throughout the 1980s, in addition to working on his own personal projects, Mettler would also collaborate as a cinematographer on several key films in the Toronto New Wave cinema, such as Atom Egoyan's early features Next of Kin (1984) and Family Viewing (1987).

The Top of His Head

Following Eastern Avenue, Mettler wrote and directed

Genie Award
nominations. Tectonic Plates

In 1992, Mettler adapted the stage play Tectonic Plates by Robert Lepage, in collaboration with Lepage and Theatre Repère. Rather than document a performance or adapt the stage narrative into screen drama, the film, shot on location in Venice, Scotland, and Montreal, "seeks to articulate cinematically the intersections of theatre and cinema, past and present, culture and nature, interior and exterior, representation and reality".[8] "The result", writes Vit Wagner in the Toronto Star, "is an intriguing and visually tantalizing collage that bridges the two media in a way that structurally underscores Lepage's themes of convergence, separation and transformation".[9] The play is a series of vignettes that draw inspiration from the movement of geologic tectonic plates. This metaphor expanded Mettler's associative approach to narrative, which would be developed further in his later documentaries Picture of Light (1994), Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002), and The End of Time (2012).

Picture of Light

aurora borealis on film. Mettler took up the challenge, braving arctic temperatures and constructing a special time-lapse camera system capable of operating in severe nighttime conditions during the film's photography in Churchill, Manitoba. A "beguiling and often breathtaking documentary about the meaning and mythology of the Northern Lights",[11] Picture of Light laid the foundations for Mettler's exploratory essay style, and was widely acclaimed, winning numerous awards. In 2017, the film was one of eight Canadian classics screened at the Toronto International Film Festival as part of its celebration of Canada's sesquicentennial.[12]

Balifilm, Krapp's Last Tape

Between Picture of Light and his next major project, the colossal Gambling, Gods and LSD, Mettler crafted the transfixing and elegant 28-minute Balifilm (1997). Weaving various images captured during travels in Indonesia with a soundtrack of Gamelan music, the film "may be the closest Mettler has come to a cinema of trance".[13]

Mettler and Atom Egoyan reunited once more as cinematographer and director, respectively, for an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's monodrama Krapp's Last Tape (2000), which starred John Hurt, as part of the Beckett on Film series.

Gambling, Gods and LSD

Genie Award
for Best Documentary.

Image Mixing

After Gambling, Gods and LSD, Mettler became interested in developing an improvisational approach to cinematic montage within a live context. Using material from his own films, including countless hours of outtakes and an immense personal trove of diaristic video, alongside a virtually unlimited range of found footage sources, Mettler creates audiovisual mixes through live improvisation, often accompanied by an improvising musician, such as Fred Frith, or a DJ, such as Biosphere. Since 2005, Mettler has worked with the software company Derivative to develop an ever-evolving image-mixing software platform. Mettler regards the work of image-mixing as a way of processing material in an image-saturated culture: "you're taking images that are coming at you from the world and making them your own. You're possessing the things that are bombarding you all the time."[16] Mettler's image-mixing work has developed almost entirely in live, ephemeral contexts, but a "hallucinatory portal sequence"[17] in The End of Time (2012) gives viewers a hint of some of the ways in which this work manifests. Most recently, Mettler has toured across Europe performing Yoshtoyoshto, a live event fusing image, story, and music produced in collaboration with anthropologist Jeremy Narby and musician Franz Treichler.[18]

Manufactured Landscapes, Petropolis

Mettler served as cinematographer on Manufactured Landscapes (2006), director Jennifer Baichwal's documentary travelogue, essay film and portrait of Edward Burtynsky, the Canadian photographer famous for his large-format images of industrial landscapes and their impact on the environment and on human existence. Among the film's numerous international accolades was a Cinema Eye Honors Award nomination for Best Cinematography for Mettler.

Shot entirely from a helicopter, the

Genie Award-nominated Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands (2009) found Mettler returning to a somewhat more experimental form, examining the titular subject, the world's largest industrial, capital and energy project, exclusively from a great distance and at a great height. Largely wordless, the film is at once bleak and wondrous, a study in both feats of industry and ecological malfeasance. "The object of the documentary isn't the vast domain of the oil sands, one visible from space and part of a post-terrestrial, post-human landscape", writes Georgiana Banita, "but something very human indeed, dependent on the viewers' ability to make sense, literally, of what they see on the surface of the earth, whose every mound and fracture the film painstakingly resisters".[19] Jerry White in Cinema Scope wrote: "Like Mettler’s previous epics of exploration Gambling, Gods and LSD and Picture of Light, Petropolis is a work animated by the powerful desire to discover the unknown, and [...] by an equally powerful humility before the formidable challenges that this unknown throws up against our senses and the technology that seeks to extend those senses."[20]

The End of Time, Broken Land

Mettler's 2012 film The End of Time drew upon the associative, essayistic techniques that defined both Picture of Light and Gambling, Gods and LSD as a means of exploring the elusive nature of time through science, art, history, anecdote and interview, and various ontologies and beliefs. Mettler visits numerous locales, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the site of the Detroit workshop where Henry Ford invented the Model-T, the home of a Hawaiian hermit untroubled by encroaching lava, and a Hindu funeral held near the alleged site of the Buddha's enlightenment. The End of Time, writes critic Adam Nayman, "exists in the twilight zone that is home to much of the best non-fiction filmmaking: at once rousing and sobering, baffling and precise, epic and intimate"."[21] The film's final stop is Mettler's childhood home, where he visits his mother, then in her eighties, to ask about her sense of time's passage. Time is there to enjoy everything you possibly can, she says. “Is that the right answer?” [22] Mettler closes the film on a note of ambiguity. "Like the scientists with whom and about whom he makes his films", writes scholar Jerry White in Of This Place and Elsewhere, "and like the philosophers who seem to be his constant companions, he is always open to the wonder of an unpredictable result".[23]

Following The End of Time, Mettler served as cinematographer on Broken Land (2014), a documentary about life and migration along the Mexico-U.S. border, co-directed by Stéphanie Barbey and Luc Peter.

Becoming Animal

Shot entirely in Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park, Becoming Animal (2018), co-directed by Mettler and Emma Davie, is a dialogue with, rather than an adaptation of, ecologist and philosopher David Abram's eponymous book. Weaving images of wildlife and places where wilderness intersects with tourist culture, along with commentaries from Abram, Mettler and Davie, Becoming Animal observes the sensory relay between man, animal and the natural world and considers what's at stake when we forfeit our connection to nature. "Cinematographically beautiful", Ellen Lande writes, it "offers insights and observations into the philosophy of modern man and how far away from nature we have placed ourselves".[24]

Filmography

Feature films

Year Film Notes Awards
1982 Scissere 87 min. experimental narrative.
  • World Premiere in "New Directors/New Directions" at the Toronto Festival of Festivals (TIFF)
  • Norman MacLaren Award, Best Canadian Student Film.[4]
  • Nominated for Gold Hugo, Chicago International Film Festival
1985 Eastern Avenue 58 min. experimental travelogue.
  • World Premiere at Toronto International Film Festival
1989 The Top of His Head 110 min. feature drama.
  • Genie Award
    nomination for Best Original Screenplay
  • Silver Plate Award, Figueira da Foz Festival
1992 Tectonic Plates 104 min. feature drama, adaptation of the play by Robert Lepage.
  • Most Innovative Film of the Festival, Figuera da Foz;[25]
  • Catholic Jury Award, Mannheim Film Festival
  • Genie Award
    nomination for Best Achievement in Art Direction/Production Design
  • Christopher Columbus Award, Most Original and Creative of the Festival, Columbus International Film & Video Festival, Columbus, Ohio.
1994 Picture of Light 83 min. feature documentary.
1997 Balifilm 28 min. documentary
2002 Gambling, Gods and LSD 180 min. feature documentary.
  • Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television
  • Grand Prix & Prix du Publique, Visions du Reèl (Nyon, France);
  • NFB Best Feature Documentary, Vancouver International Film Festival
  • NFB Best Documentary,
    Festival du Nouveau Cinema
    (Montreal)
  • 3SAT Prize for Best Documentary at Duisburger Filmwoche[28]
  • "Top Twenty Canadian Films", Toronto International Film Festival
  • Award for Excellence in the Arts, Swiss Ministry of Culture
2009 Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands 43 min. documentary, co-produced by Greenpeace Canada.
2012 The End of Time 114 min. feature documentary.
  • Premio Qualita di Vita Award,
    Locarno International Film Festival
  • Golden Leopard Nominee,
    Locarno International Film Festival
  • “Canada’s Top Ten",Toronto International Film Festival
  • Nominated for DOX:AWARD,
    CPH:DOX
  • Nominated for Best Screenplay, Vancouver Film Critics Circle
  • Nominated for Best Documentary, Music, Camera,
    Swiss Film Prize
    Nominations.
  • Nominated: Best World Documentary,
    Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival
    .
2018 Becoming Animal 78 min. feature documentary.
  • Nominated for Fugas Feature Film Competition, Documenta Madrid
  • Nominated for Grand Prix, Docs Against Gravity
  • Nominated for Best Feature, Bildrausch Filmfest
  • Nominated for Best Feature Documentary, Edinburgh International Film Festival
  • Nominated for Best Testimony on Nature,
    Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival
  • Nominated for DOX:AWARD,
    CPH:DOX
  • Official Selection – Masters, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA)

Short films

  • Reverie (1976), 20 minutes.
  • Lancalot Freely (1980), 20 minutes.
  • Gregory (1980), 25 minutes.
  • Balifilm (1997), 30 minutes. Best Short Film, Duisburger Filmwoche.
  • Away (2007), 3 minutes. Co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
  • Trace of the future (2014), 3 minutes. Produced by Visions du Réel, to celebrate the festival's twentieth anniversary.

Cinematography (selected)

References

  1. ^ "Peter Mettler – The Canadian Encyclopedia".
  2. ^ Teodoro, José. "An Interview with Peter Mettler". Brick. Brick. Retrieved 18 April 2021.
  3. ^ Teodoro, José. "Nothing But Time". filmcomment.com. Film Comment. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  4. ^ a b "Scissere (1982)". Northern Stars. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
  5. .
  6. .
  7. ^ Kirkland, Bruce (November 24, 1989). "Top marks for Top Of His Head". The Toronto Sun.
  8. .
  9. ^ Wagner, Vit (November 27, 1992). "Lepage play great on screen". The Toronto Star.
  10. ^ Teodoro, José. "An Interview with Peter Mettler". brickmag.com. Brick. Retrieved 6 April 2021.
  11. ^ Pevere, Geoff (September 12, 1994). "Cold snap". The Globe and Mail.
  12. ^ "LIGHT UP THE NATION: CANADA'S 150 DEFINITIVE WORKS" (PDF). tiff.net. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
  13. ISSN 1192-5507
    .
  14. ^ "In search of wonder: Peter Mettler's Gambling, Gods and LSD, Take One". TakeOne. Archived from the original on 2016-02-24. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
  15. ^ Bailey, Cameron. "Trance & transcendence: Peter Mettler's gambling, gods and LSD tracks ecstatic treks". nowtoronto.com. Now. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
  16. ^ Isabelle. "Keeping in Real Time With Peter Mettler and Mixxa". derivative.ca. Derivative. Retrieved 22 April 2021.
  17. ^ Teodoro, José. "Nothing But Time". filmcomment.com. Film Comment. Retrieved 22 April 2021.
  18. ^ "Théàtre Vidy-Lausanne". tidy.ch. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
  19. .
  20. ^ White, Jerry. "Spotlight Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands". cinema-scope.com. Cinema Scope. Retrieved 18 April 2021.
  21. ^ Nayman, Adam. "All Things Must Pass: Peter Mettler's The End of Time". Point of View Magazine. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
  22. ^ Teodoro, José. "Nothing But Time". filmcomment.com. Film Comment. Retrieved 6 April 2021.
  23. .
  24. ^ Lande, Ellen. "A thought-provoking, peculiar exploration of nature". modern times.review. Modern Times Review. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
  25. ^ "Tectonic Plates". Bullfrog Films. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
  26. ^ "Home / Protokolle / 1997 / Balifilm". protokult.de. Protokult Duisburger Protokolle. Retrieved 22 April 2021.
  27. ^ "Visions du Réel Films 2020 Atelier Peter Mettler Balifilm". visionsdereel.ch. Visions du réel. Retrieved 22 April 2021.
  28. ^ "Gambling, Gods and LSD Awards". swissfilms.ch. Swiss Films. Retrieved 22 April 2021.
  29. ^ Melissa Leong, "Massacre story leads Genies; Quebec films dominate movie awards". Calgary Herald, March 2, 2010.

Further reading

External links