CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY ONLINE SCREENER
Picture of Light
Canada / 1994 / 87 minutes
A mesmerizing tale about a filmmaker’s journey to Canada’s arctic in search of one of Earth’s greatest natural wonders: the aurora borealis, or northern lights. While combining glimpses of the characters who live in this remote environment with the crew’s comic and absurd attempts to deal with the extreme cold, the film reveals the paradoxes involved in trying to capture the natural wonder of the northern lights on celluloid.
Exploring the tension between nature and technology and between science and myth, Picture of Light reveals how our increasingly connected world threatens to render obsolete our individual and authentic experiences.
“We live in a time where things do not seem to exist if they are not captured as an image. But if you look into darkness you may see the lights of your own retina – not unlike the northern lights, not unlike the movements of thought. Like a shapeless accumulation of everything we have ever seen.”
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
After strenuous and complicated technical preparations (including devising methods to protect the camera against -40˚C temperatures), and with 50 pounds of batteries packed in their luggage, the crew sets out on a 3000-mile train journey through uninhabited snowy landscapes to the end of the civilized world: Churchill, Manitoba. Violent snowstorms force them to settle down to wait for a clear night in which the lights might appear. The TV set gains importance as the only link between the town’s inhabitants and the outside world. Residents are interviewed about their life under the northern lights: the hotel owner hardly takes any notice of them; the priest is reminded of searchlights during WWII; an Inuit elder speaks of their hypnotizing effect and recalls that people used to tell the weather forecast by them; another enthuses over the beauty of their colours. A member of Spacelab 3 reports from outer space about his observations of the polar lights, explaining the effects of their enormous sources of energy on the earth's magnetosphere. Amidst all this, Mettler himself provides a diary-like voice-over, augmenting the film’s images with anecdotes and Inuit legends, while simultaneously questioning the act and responsibility of creating filmic representations of natural phenomena.
Over the course of a one-year editing process, the film gradually took shape out of 18 hours of film material collected during two trips to Churchill. The aurora could only be made visible by shooting three frames per minute and later expanding time via optical printing. Mettler was aware that the images presented to the audience would suggest a reality completely different from the actual experience, and had already begun to question the impulse to collect images during the long and cold nights in Churchill. For this reason, in Picture of Light he decided for the first time to use voice-over, with which he self-critically tests the powerful potential and authority of the ‘invisible’ voice.
Like Mettler’s earlier films, Picture of Light deals with the tension between nature and technology, science and mythology. It reflects upon the desire to track down the wonders of the world and capture them on film, questioning the ways in which perceptions molded by media forms increasingly threaten to replace our individual authentic experiences.
CREDITS
A Grimthorpe Film and Andreas Züst production
Director and Text: Peter Mettler
Camera: Peter Mettler
Additional Camera: Gerald Packer, Mark Cyre
Sound Recording: Leon Johnson, Gaston Kyriazi
Picture Editing: Peter Mettler, Mike Munn
Additional Picture Editing: Catherine Martin, Alexandra Gill
Sound Editing: Peter Mettler, Peter Braeker, Alexandra Gill
Original Music: Jim O’Rourke
Sound Mix: Hans Kuenzi
Producers: Andreas Züst, Peter Mettler, Alexandra Gill
Shooting Location: Churchill, Manitoba, Canada