Peter Mettler

Peter Mettler (born September 7, 1958) is a Swiss-Canadian film director and cinematographer.

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.

Scissere

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

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

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", 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.

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".

Following Eastern Avenue, Mettler wrote and directed The Top of His Head (1989), a feature drama that follows a satellite salesman's "unexpected spiritual odyssey" after meeting a radical performance artist.

As with Mettler's subsequent films, The Top of His Head explores the nature of human perception and technology's ability to liberate and enslave experience through the power of recording media.

"The images are dazzling", writes Bruce Kirkland.

"Forced telephoto perspectives on industrial wastelands jar the eye. Extreme close-ups turn a drop of water into a micro-universe."

The film received three 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".

"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".

The play is a series of vignettes that draw inspiration from the movement of geologic tectonic plates.

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."

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.

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

Picture of Light (1994), Mettler's "meditative, at times profoundly beautiful non-fiction adventure film", was made as a result of a chance meeting at a dinner party with the Swiss artist, collector and meteorologist Andreas Züst, who proposed that Mettler capture the 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", Picture of Light laid the foundations for Mettler's exploratory essay style, and was widely acclaimed, winning numerous awards.

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".

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

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.

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.

Balifilm, Krapp's Last Tape