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Becoming Animal
Directed by Emma Davie and Peter Mettler.
UK/Switzerland, 2018, 79 minutes.
Shot in Grand Teton National Park, this immersive essay film draws together the distinct sensibilities of filmmakers Emma Davie and Peter Mettler and philosopher David Abram to encounter the spaces where humans and animals meet. We pique our senses to witness the so-called natural world – which in turn witnesses us. Moose clash antlers and a snail's body becomes a landscape while the myriad sensory tools of cinema explore our complicity with this “more than human world.”
The End of Time
Switzerland/Canada, 2012, 110 minutes.
Working at the limits of what can easily be expressed, Peter Mettler takes on the elusive subject of time, and once again turns his camera to filming the unfilmmable. From the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland, where scientists seek to probe regions of time we cannot see, to lava flows in Hawaii; from the disintegration and renewal of inner-city Detroit, to a Hindu funeral rite near the site of the Buddha's enlightenment, Mettler explores our perception of time, daring to dream the movie of the future while immersing us in the wonder of the present. At once personal, rigorous and visionary, The End of Time is a film as compelling and magnificent as its subject.
Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands
Canada, 2009, 43 minutes.
Shot from a helicopter, Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands offers an unparalleled view of the world's largest industrial project. Canada's tar sands are an oil reserve the size of England. Extracting the crude oil called bitumen from underneath unspoiled wilderness requires a massive industrialized effort with far-reaching impacts on the land, air, water, and climate. It's an extraordinary spectacle, whose scope can only be understood from far above. In a hypnotic flight of image and sound, one machine's perspective upon the choreography of others suggests a dehumanized world where petroleum's power is supreme.
Gambling, Gods and LSD
Canada/Switzerland, 2002, 180 minutes.
An inquiry into transcendence becomes a trip across countries and cultures, interconnecting people, places and times. From Toronto, the scene of his childhood, Mettler’s journeys witness evangelism at the airport strip, demolition in Las Vegas, street life and chemistry in Switzerland, and the coexistence of technology and divinity in India. Everywhere along the way, the same themes are found: thrill-seeking, luck, destiny, belief, expanding perception, the craving for security in an uncertain world. Fact joins with fantasy; the search for meaning and the search for ecstasy begin to merge. Gambling, Gods and LSD may change the way you look at the world.
Picture of Light
Canada/Switzerland, 1994, 83 minutes.
Picture of Light is a poetic essay documenting the search for a natural wonder: the mysterious aurora borealis. After strenuous and complicated technical preparations, a film crew sets out on a 3000-mile train journey through uninhabited snowy landscapes to the end of the civilized world. Like Mettler's earlier films, Picture of Light deals with the tension between nature and technology, science and mythology. It reflects the desire to track down wonder and capture it on film, questioning ways in which experience molded by media threaten to replace our individual and authentic experiences. Selected by TIFF as one of its 150 Essential Canadian films.
Tectonic Plates
UK/Canada, 1992, 104 minutes.
Adapted from the play by Robert Lepage, Tectonic Plates utilizes the image of plate tectonics – the shifting of land masses that shape the earth's continents – as a metaphor for the evolution of human life and culture. The geology of continental drift parallels themes of merging, collision, influence, passage, developing creativity as manifest in the natural world, art world, relationships and sexuality. Tectonic Plates is a complex and evocative voyage into the geology of human behaviour which explores, explodes and cross-fertilizes theatrical and cinematic forms.
The Top of His Head
Canada, 1989, 110 minutes.
One of the most audacious Canadian films of the 1980s, The Top of His Head blends drama and visual experimentation to offer an unique vision that remains a provocative statement on media environments. When satellite dish salesman Gus Victor becomes infatuated with a performance artist named Lucy, his ordered universes begins to disintegrate as he falls into a trance-like search that causes his perception of the world to shift. The Top of His Head is an avant-garde fairy tale years ahead of its time – a little-seen masterpiece whose ultimate subject is to uncover new ways of seeing.
Eastern Avenue
Canada/Switzerland, 1985, 58 minutes.
"In the spring of 1983, I took a trip into my intuition through Switzerland, Berlin, and Portugal. The following images are, for the most part, impulsive intuitive reactions…”
Eastern Avenue is a travelogue described in textures: cloud formations, snowy landscapes, a young woman painting, the interior of a baroque church, dilapidated buildings, a child’s sandcastle, steam rising from a coffee cup. Mettler's images mirror the fragmented impressions of remembered experience, tracing a personal trajectory from the wellsprings of the mind.
Scissere
Canada, 1982, 83 minutes.
A first-person foray into the disorienting realm between reason and sensation, Peter Mettler’s Scissere deploys a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of optical effects in rendering the experiences of a troubled mind. Wide-eyed and frightened, the central figure imagines himself inside three people he randomly spots at a bus station: a young mother, a heroin addict, and an entomologist. Elusive and aesthetically rich, Scissere is a film that deliberately eludes categorization or description, and with good reason: the only logic heeded by a film about the surrender to intuition is the logic of sensation.