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This
article was originally published in 1995 and reprinted in Take
One’s 50th Anniversary Edition in 2005
“What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall
write down will be successive because language is successive.”
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
“An image conjures experiences, feelings, and thoughts that
are often more powerful and reach deeper into the unconscious
than those of words.”
Peter Mettler
Out of the simple beguiling paradox that language cannot express
the inexpressible, Toronto–based filmmaker Peter Mettler
has fashioned a daringly original and decidedly paradoxical cinematic
career. Like Jorge Luis Borges, who admits he can only approximate
infinities of time and space, Mettler uses the cinematic language
of the images in succession to suggest what cannot be captured
on film. In Mettler’s films, images conjure much more than
they represent. Adding to this anti–Grierson wold view—seeing
isn’t always believing—Mettler’s ambivalence
toward the technology of his chosen medium and his profound sense
of wonder about the world, the paradoxes threaten to paralyze.
Nevertheless, like Borges, Mettler knows that language, in whatever
form, is all we have. Despite its limitations, it can be expanded
to admit more possibilities, and the cinema of Peter Mettler is
nothing if not expansive.
From his earliest films, especially the experimental first feature
Scissere (1982), to more recent works like The Top of His Head
(1989) and Tectonic Plates (1992), Mettler has always pushed cinematic
boundaries, thematically and stylistically. Perhaps this is what
makes his work so intense and exciting to some and, yet, so remote
and inaccessible to others. However, with his masterful new film
about the aurora borealis, Picture of Light, a breathtaking investigation
of the powers and limits of film language, Mettler should assume
his rightful, prominent place in contemporary Canadian cinema.
Indeed, when you look closely at the rich, recent history of Canadian
film, you will discover just how important Mettler is. His name
is ubiquitous. As a gifted cinematographer (he is without question
one of the best cinematographers in Canada), he worked on the
early shorts and features of Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, Patricia
Rozema, Jeremy Podeswa and many others. Like his contemporaries,
Mettler emerged out of that unlikely renaissance of Canadian filmmaking
in the early 1980s, when imagination and experimentation prevailed
over budgets and conventional narratives in the immediate post–tax–shelter
era. The possibilities of expanding cinematic language, moving
beyond the empirical realist traditions of Canadian cinema, is
something that he has pursued from Scissere to Picture of Light.
Arguably more than any other filmmaker of his generation working
outside experimental cinema, Mettler had refined that pursuit
in a quiet, thoughtful way into an aesthetic code, an artistic
raison d’etre.
Born in Toronto in 1958 to Swiss parents, Mettler’s attraction
to the creation of images came at a very early age. He recalls,
“One of my most powerful memories from childhood is of a
cigarette–length ash resting on a plant. That image remains
with me today and I suppose, on some level, I recognized the power
of images by this experience. It’s difficult to explain,
but ever since I’ve always been attracted to images.”
After doing what he terms “all the normal school stuff”
(he was enrolled in and expelled from a private school in Toronto),
Mettler pursued his interest in images by attending Toronto’s
Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. He then spent a year in Switzerland
as an observer in a heroin rehabilitation centre. Calling this
his “first real–world education,” the experience
also formed the raw material for his first feature, Scissere.
Although he did make two earlier half–hour films, Lancelot
Freely (a documentary about a young Toronto degenerate) and Gregory
(a film about a man haunted by his past), it is with Scissere
that Mettler first demonstrated his considerable cinematic talents.
The film is also his first successful confrontation with the paradox
of using a visual medium to express the troubled interior of his
central character. Given its scope, ambition and visual sophistication,
it is easy to forget that Scissere is actually a student film.
Dedicated to Bruno Scissère, a patient in the Swiss rehabilitation
centre, the film is a visually striking study of psychological,
spatial and temporal dislocation and alienation. It is the story
of a young man who struggles to cope with a fragmented sense of
himself and the “normal” world into which he has been
released. Interweaving the narrative with a young mother searching
for meaning and an entomologist whose rationalist diligence leads
to the discovery of a new species of moth, Mettler adumbrates
an underlying theme in all of his work: the search, as he puts
it, for a “balance between intellect and intuition, order
and chaos, action and perception.”
The search for balance is continued in more personal terms in
Eastern Avenue (1985), a poetic, 58–minute perceptual road
movie about intuition. Beginning in Berlin and ending in Portugal,
the film presents a freely flowing series of impressionistic images;
complex and allusive, the film wrestles with the difficulty of
representing the processes of thought and response in visual and
aural language. Moreover, in a formal sense, it embodies the very
paradox with which Mettler’s cinema constantly dances: representing
the unrepresentable. Conceived as an “exploration of intuition,”
and an attempt to reflect cinematically the “movements of
the unconscious,” Eastern Avenue also served as Mettler’s
preliminary visual notes for his next dramatic feature, The Top
of His Head.
Three years in the making, The Top of His Head is Mettler’s
attempt to integrate ideas of interiority and intuition into a
more conventional narrative film. Sounding echoes of Andrei Tarkovsky,
Stanley Kubrick and Canadian philosopher George Grant, The Top
of His Head is a wryly observed tale about the dangers of inhabiting
a world of rational, technological certitude. Focussing on satellite
salesman Gus Victor (Stephen Ouimette) on the day he expects to
close a deal that will secure a comfortable technocentric future,
the film becomes a chronicle of its protagonist’s decidedly
unexpected spiritual odyssey. When technology fails (his car breaks
down), Gus plunged into an irrational netherworld of dreams and
desire about his artist girlfriend (Christie MacFadyen), and about
escape from his artificial lifestyle. As his conscious and unconscious
worlds collapse into each other, Gus becomes a bewildered bundle
of uncertainty, an unsteady amalgam of Buster Keaton and almost
any Samuel Beckett character. Unlike many baffled Canadian protagonists
before and after him, we sense that Gus just might be resourceful
enough to find his balance.
As with Scissere, Mettler says that The Top of His Head is trying
to show the audience what is happening in the protagonist’s
inner life. By intercutting often startling dream imagery and
using a variety of optical and sonic effects throughout the narrative
he challenges the conventions of dramatic action and character
development. In doing so, Mettler states that he hopes to “draw
attention to the limits of language and cinematic traditions.”
Mettler’s approach to cinematic expression unsettles our
expectations and encourages us, like Gus, to look at the world
in new ways—the world which seems fixed is actually in flux;
the familiar becomes strange; the strange becomes familiar.
It is appropriate that for his next film Mettler collaborated
with Canadian theatrical innovator Robert Lepage on a film version
of Lepage’s stunning production, Tectonic Plates. The play
itself, never performed exactly the same way twice, expands traditional
theatrical space and uses as its central metaphor the scientific
discovery of plate tectonics. Continents long regarded as fixed
are actually enormous floating rafts in constant motion. There
is no terra firma, temporally, spatially, or culturally: in short,
a tailor–made, multi–layered Mettlerian metaphor.
Indeed, Mettler uses cinematic techniques (camera movement, discontinuous
editing, optical effects) to suggest layers of ideas, images and
historical eras with which Lepage shapes his play. More than a
recorded performance, Tectonic Plates articulates cinematically
the intersection of past and present, culture and nature, interior
and exterior, representation and reality.
It is to this representation and reality that Mettler’s
latest offering, Picture of Light, addresses itself. Throughout
the film, Mettler asks directly: how do you speak the unspeakable,
describe the indescribable, and more precisely, film the unfilmable?
More than a film about the Northern Lights, Picture of Light is
nothing less than a summation of Mettler’s philosophical
approach to his paradoxical art. Appropriately, the genesis of
the film is as remarkable as the film itself. Mettler met meteorologist
and artist Andrea Zuest at a dinner in Switzerland. Their mutual
interest in auroras and “the pursuit of wonder” led
to Zuest agreeing to fund the film. Subsequently, Mettler, Zuest,
and a small crew made two winter visits to Churchill, Manitoba,
to film the aurora borealis with a special computer–designed
camera.
On one level, Picture of Light is a quintessential Canadian portrait
of a natural world in extremis—a community surviving in
a harsh land; a living, breathing, good–natured defiance
of the elements; a frigid reminder of the necessity and futility
of technology. It is also an examination of an elusive, fluid
subject from different points of view. Essentially, the film is
an accumulation of representations, or pictures of the lights,
whether in language, photographic or video images. Each picture
is incomplete, approximate; each an explanation or limited interpretation.
Yet, each is spellbinding. When the lights are revealed in spectacular
fashion (shot at slow speed and optically printed to stretch time),
we are reminded that we are not looking at the real thing. It
does not matter. The trick of physics and the “lies”
of the camera that have made the images possible create wonder
and awe. The paradox is complete.
Beyond the information within its extraordinary frames, the film
is an investigation of knowledge and representation worthy of
Werner Herzog or Chris Marker. From its title onward, Picture
of Light articulates the paradox of the extraordinary film unspooling
before us. In a voice-over that at once affirms and questions
its authoritative role in the documentary tradition, Mettler reminds
us that his tools are inadequate and falsifying. We know he is
right. We also know, as he does, that these pictures of light,
these simulacra, do inspire wonder, do remind us that, for all
our scientific marvels and technological advances, we remain unfinished
and searching. In its meditative, marvelous simplicity, Picture
of Light unmasks its frames, and demands that we look beyond them.
Already an award winner in Canada and Europe, Picture of Light
should enlarge Mettler’s audience and garner him some long–overdue
recognition. But that isn’t why he makes films. He regards
filmmaking as “an endless process of discovery” and
definitely “a spiritual path.” It is also, as Mettler
states, “the best medium in which to delve into questions
of balancing intellect and intuition, because cinema itself contains
within it the many corruptions and wonders of the times.”
Indeed, trapped as the times are in a technocentric rationalism,
and using the very tools of the times to make images which suggest
what cannot be seen, the films of Peter Mettler reveal how these
insoluble, inexhaustible paradoxes can become, in gifted hands,
the wonder of cinema itself.
Tom McSorley is executive director and director of programming
at the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa. He lectures on Canadian
cinema at Carleton University, is a programmer at the Montreal
World Film Festival and an associate editor at Take One. |
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