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Excerpted from Take One Magazine Special
Edition 2004 introduction,
“Peter Mettler: The Pursuit of Wonder”
In his voice-over
to the transcendental documentary Gambling, Gods and LSD, a globetrotting
as well as form-altering account of the things people do to attain
grace, Peter Mettler admits to a lifelong captivation with ‘the
pursuit of wonder.’
A student of experimental film with a sharp cinematic eye –
he worked quite distinctively as a cinematographer for hire early
in his career – Mettler may be the only member among his
Toronto contemporaries to be so purely motivated by metaphysical
concerns. His films shift shapes, textures, and forms constantly
– there is not a single Mettler film that doesn’t
call upon a form of hyphenated categorization – as though
always searching for the most appropriate means of expressing
the inexpressible. When he uses his own voiceover, as he does
in 1996’s Picture of Light and 2002’s Gambling, Gods
and LSD, it’s frequently to pose questions about the practical
challenge of recording the unseen.
For Mettler, the camera is not a medium for capturing reality
but a means of seeing beyond it, and his stubbornly noncommercial
approach to moviemaking would seem to suggest someone less interested
in filmmaking as a professional pursuit than as a kind of mission,
an approach that has sent the Canadian-born filmmaker of Swiss
background around the world in search of funding for projects
that often take years to complete. At their most metaphysically
convincing, Mettler’s films don’t feel like something
selected and shot by a camera. They feel like something the camera
was selected to shoot.
Although not as widely known as some of the peers he once shot
for (including Egoyan, McDonald, and Rozema, and Ron Mann), and
while considerably more difficult to neatly categorize, Mettler’s
‘pursuit’ has variously led him to documentary, drama,
and experimental practices. Indeed, he may be the most internally
influential of this entire Toronto group, the one whose contribution,
both as a technician and an inspiration, acts as a kind of unifying
force that flows through everything, like the images of water
that ripple across his own films. At the very least, his seriousness
about the medium, his belief that films can be windows to enlightenment,
seems to provide this entire group with a basic presumption of
artistic entitlement. He never lets his peers forget the divine
pursuit. Moreover, because the films of Peter Mettler settle for
nothing less than the possibility of realms beyond perception
and insist that seeing is so much more than just looking, one
way in which this otherwise un-categorizable member of the early
1980s Toronto filmmaking community is perfectly at home is in
his sense of restlessness. He dreams of elsewhere.
Toronto, it would seem, is a good place to feel nowhere, or at
least to think of somewhere else. If it’s this sense of
urban placelessness that acts as a peculiar bonding agent in the
work of Mettler’s generation of Toronto filmmakers, Mettler
himself has merely taken that sense to its most existential extreme.
With a practice that tilts most naturally toward a kind of first-person
experimental, Mettler has created a cinema that seeks nothing
less than a portal beyond the apparent. In his films, the sense
of alienated urbanity evident in the works of much of his contemporaries
reaches its most transcendent expression. For Toronto filmmakers,
disengagement might be the inevitable result of working in a form
that has been all but invisible in the country where it is made.
The capital of English-language Canadian film and television production,
the city is a place where the bulk of moviemaking activity is
taken up either by the production of generic spectacles set somewhere
else or the making of Canadian movies that very few Canadians
will ever see. The question, it would seem, is therefore not why
so many Toronto filmmakers have felt drawn to the depiction of
alienated states of existence, but perhaps why many have not.
From the beginning, Peter Mettler was. His first feature, Scissere,
an experimental/dramatic hybrid made in 1982 while he was a student
at Ryerson, where he was influenced by the work and teachings
of the experimental filmmaker and theoretician R. Bruce Elder
(whose own films addressed the idea of the cinematic divine),
deals ostensibly with the release of a mental patient onto Toronto’s
streets. It’s really, however, an exercise in seeing beyond.
After observing three people emerge from a subway station, the
film imagines the three very different experiences of reality
these individuals inhabit, but whether this is indeed their perception
or the projection of a schizophrenic mental patient we are not
entirely certain. For purposes of establishing a sense of the
relativity of subjectivity and the free-flowing nature of consciousness,
however, it doesn’t matter. Like all of his work, Scissere
is about seeing beyond the apparent, the rational, and the intellectual.
Frequently trancelike in its nonlinear assembly of sound and image,
the film also marks an early indication of Mettler’s strategy
to produce films that are as much a sensual as an intellectual
experience. If emotions are the engine of intuition, Mettler’s
cinema of emotional impressionism is perfectly understandable.
It aims to put us in a properly receptive state for arrival of
wonder.
His next film, the experimental diary/ travelogue Eastern Avenue,
is an even more explicit and boldly nonlinear attempt to create
a filmic experience that is purely intuitive in form and intent.
It’s also more personal. A series of scenes and impressions
recorded while the filmmaker was traveling in Europe, it represents
a kind of automatic writing on film, and the first of the director’s
increasingly peripatetic wanderings in search of a camera-ready
spiritual deliverance. In this case, the experiment is as much
conceptual as it is formal. The introductory titles to the film
inform us that Eastern Avenue is an exercise in the intuitive
assembly, an attempt to create a cinematic experience as close
as possible to the free-flow of the open imagination itself. The
pursuit ‘of wonder.’ Wonder, in Mettler’s metaphysic,
would seem to lie not just beyond the apparent but the obvious
too.
If there is an obstacle to the clear pursuit of wonder, it might
be narrative, that architectural assembly of imagined events that
puts ideas at the service of dramatic convention. Or so it would
seem based on 1989’s The Top of His Head, Mettler’s
only foray (so far) into anything like conventional dramatic narrative.
The story, written by Mettler, of a spiritually-untapped satellite
television salesman named Gus (Stephen Ouimette) whose paradigm
shifts after meeting a free-spirited performance artist (Christie
MacFadyen), revisits Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and Jonathan
Demme’s Something Wild by way of Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Red Desert. Where the film really lifts its lid as a viewing experience
is during those moments when the hero simply takes leave of logic
and plunges headlong into a pond that, once dived into, contains
a submerged universe of wonder, coming upon an entrancing piece
of performance art that involves the metronomic swinging of lamps
on long ropes. In these moments of extra-logical and intuitive
fascination, The Top of His Head transcends its own cerebrum and
it’s little wonder why Mettler has proved indifferent to
returning to narrative filmmaking since. It would seem to be inimical
to wonder’s pursuit.
Strangely, however, reality is not. On the contrary, Picture of
Light, Mettler’s popular, critically praised, and widely
seen work is at first glance a relatively straight-ahead documentary.
Traveling to Churchill, Manitoba, to capture on film the celestial
spectacle of the Northern Lights, Mettler and his crew are engaged
in a stirring, almost Boy’s Own kind of adventure of discovery.
With its evocations of polar expeditions and supernatural wonders,
Picture of Light is both a transfixing nonfiction adventure story
and an extension of Mettler peripatetic pursuit of the mystic,
which is possibly why the film can be so otherwise conventional.
Unlike The Top of His Head, which ground gears in shifting from
the requirements of dramatic ex-position to the intimation of
the divine, Picture of Light has all the legitimately awesome
wonder one could want in the physical display of Aurora Borealis.
In the lights – which look on film like the skyward version
of those shimmering waves the director is so fascinated by –
Mettler finds his wonder. And miraculous it is, capable of being
appreciated at once physically and spiritually, explained scientifically
and mythically, of being appreciated as natural and supernatural,
or as matter and metaphor.
Easily the most wide-ranging and categorically unconventional
of his Toronto filmmaking peers, Mettler makes films that are
part of an ongoing journey toward a heightened consciousness,
which makes the recurring water imagery both a handy metaphor
for epic discovery and an apt symbol of passage to other worlds.
The water is at once a surface, a window, a means of transport,
and an agent of transformation. And it always flows. In Tectonic
Plates, the feature film Mettler directed for British television
from Robert Lepage’s play about love and death in Venice,
water laps about the characters’ feet, ankles, and sometimes
even throats, a fact that is only made more disconcerting by Mettler’s
non-naturalistic, largely set-bound adaptation of the play. The
whole venture seems to be going under as you’re watching
it, as if it is the final performance of some house troupe on
a sinking ship.
However, the water that rises constantly in Tectonic Plates is
also a medium for transformation, a reminder of the ephemeral
nature of all things, the arrogant hubris of the human ego, and
the relentless rollover of time itself. Water, the medium from
whence we came – and which flows through the frame, existing
both before and beyond it – will also be the one to which
we’ll all go, carried along in its ceaseless flow. If for
Lepage the Venetian water imagery might have represented the ultimate
ephemerality of art and human endeavour, for Mettler it probably
stood – as it perhaps always has – for something more
spiritually affirmative, as proof there must be something larger,
more profound and powerful than the here and now. If everything
yields to the water at some point or another, meaning must be
gleaned from that certainty; the certainty of our own fleeting
passage through the frame and of the forces that move us from
one condition of existence to another.
In his striving for a form of purely intuitive cinema, Mettler
produces work that is far more attracted to evocative or poetic
associations than it is to particular concepts or rhetorical exposition.
Even in his documentary work, the relationship between sequential
images is just as likely to be dictated by conceptual association
as it is by rational persuasion. If this has drawn the filmmaker
equally to experimental and documentary practice, and away from
fictional narrative, it has also drawn him around the world and
in the direction of music. If the pursuit of wonder presumes certain
mobility, it also calls for a certain sensitivity to extra-filmic
experience. If you’re going to use the frame to see beyond
it, you’ve got to think of film itself as more than what’s
contained on screen.
Balifilm, a compendium of images recorded by the director while
traveling in Indonesia and set to an improvised percussive score
of Balinese music, may be Mettler’s most successful and
succinct exercise in intuitive cinema so far. Originally conceived
as a performance piece that involved musicians performing to screened
images – mostly of Balinese dance rituals – Balifilm
is like a dialogue between music and images, an audiovisual exchange
of impressions and responses that brings the intuitive immediacy
of improvised music to the experience of watching a film. An exercise
in the melding of sound and vision, Balifilm may also be the closest
Mettler has come to a cinema of trance. If one of the conditions
of altered perception is a state of rapturous sensory response,
Balifilm works as both a vehicle to get you there and a trip in
itself.
The river flows right through not only all of Mettler’s
work, but from the very beginning to the very end of Gambling,
Gods and LSD, his three-hour diary documentary about the human
yearning for transcendence. The first image in this epic of pursued
wonder is of a wilderness river’s surface viewed from a
boat, and the final is of a boy running along a shoreline. Again,
while the particular strategies for spiritual and extra-physical
deliverance may range from mechanically assisted erotic stimulation
to the spasmodic fundamentalist rapture, and while the movie may
roam from the airport strip outside Toronto to a shoreline in
southern India, the river flows through everything, a medium that
both connects and transports.
There’s also an unmistakable valedictory aura running through
Gambling, Gods and LSD as well, as though the journey taken and
documented travels not only across space – a geographical
pursuit of the transcendent experience – but also time.
A trek by Mettler through his own personal and creative history.
Not only does the film ring with visual and thematic echoes from
all the filmmaker’s previous work – from Scissere’s
sparkling waters to Balifilm’s propulsive sensuality –
it seems a summation of a life spent in wonder’s pursuit.
Is transcendence achieved? Can it ever be? Or is its pursuit sufficient
in itself? These questions, it seems to this observer anyway,
remain open, even if the circle seems by this time closed. When
the man in the boat is watching the boy on shore, a certain movement
would seem to have been completed. Where this leaves Peter Mettler,
the spiritually-motivated seeker of the Toronto filmmakers who
first took up imagemaking in the early 1980s, is anyone’s
guess. But one doubts it will be in Toronto, a particularly good
point of departure for the imagining of somewhere else.Peter Mettler:
The Pursuit of Wonder
By
Geoff Pevere
For Take One Magazine Special Edition 2004
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