Peter Mettler


Peter Mettler is a Swiss-Canadian film director and cinematographer. He is best known for his unique, intuitive approach to documentary, evinced by such films as Picture of Light, Gambling, Gods and LSD, and The End of Time. He has also 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, and Franz Treichler.
He was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in the 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.

Biography

Mettler was born in 1958 in Toronto, Ontario, where he was raised. His parents were Swiss. He made his first films at the age of sixteen before studying cinema at Ryerson University. While Mettler was at Ryerson, he spent summers loading cargo onto airplanes in Zürich, and took a year off to work with residents of a heroin rehabilitation home in a twelfth-century Swiss monastery, which provided inspiration for his first feature film Scissere. Scissere was the first student film included in the Toronto International Film Festival, and received the Norman McLaren Award for Best Canadian Student Film.
Mettler followed the experimental narrative of Scissere with the intuitive travelogue diary, Eastern Avenue, a form that would become a hallmark of his filmmaking style. In the 1980s, he would also collaborate as a cinematographer on several key films in the Toronto New Wave cinema, and wrote and directed the feature drama The Top of His Head. 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.
In 1992, Mettler adapted the stage play Tectonic Plates by Robert Lepage, in collaboration with Lepage and Theatre Repère. The film was shot on location in Venice, Scotland, and Montreal. The play is a series of vignettes that draw inspiration from the movement of geologic tectonic plates. This metaphor expanded Mettler's associative approach to narrative, which would be developed further in his later documentaries Picture of Light, Gambling, Gods and LSD, and The End of Time.
Picture of Light was made as a result of a meeting with the Swiss artist-scientist-collector Andreas Züst, who proposed to Mettler to 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. Picture of Light laid the foundations for Mettler's exploratory documentary essay style, and was widely acclaimed, winning numerous awards.
Mettler's next film, Gambling, Gods and LSD was an epic project that spent ten years in the making, a three-hour long meditation on transcendence photographed across three continents, including Las Vegas, Switzerland, and southern India. The final cut was derived from a 55-hour long assembly of unique footage, which Mettler said was like "composing a piece of music". Gambling, Gods and LSD received a Genie Award for Best Documentary.
After Gambling, Gods and LSD, Mettler became interested in developing an improvisational approach to cinematic montage within a live context. Since 2005, has worked with the software company Derivative to develop an image-mixing software platform used in live performances, including "Shostakovitch/Notes in Silence", and has performed with artists including Biosphere, Fred Frith, Jeremy Narby and Franz Treichler. This technique was also used in The End of Time.

Filmography

Feature films

Short films