Peter Mettler

Peter Mettler is a Swiss-Canadian film director and cinematographer who is known as an influential member of the 1980s Toronto New Wave. He is best known for his innovative documentaries Picture of Light (1994), Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002), and The End Of Time (2012), which call into question the nature of image-making and mediated language to represent experience. His films are characterized by an improvisational approach that eschews traditional script treatment in favor of intuitive methods that combine travelogue, interview, and voice-over, and share common themes of transcendence, alternate states of perceptual awareness, and examinations of the relations between nature and technology.

Mettler's first feature, Scissere (1982), is an experimental psychodrama that bears the influence of the films of Stan Brakhage and Andrei Tarkovsky, traits also shared in Eastern Avenue (1985). Following these early experiments, Mettler produced two dramatic features, The Top of His Head (1989), and Tectonic Plates (1992), before making Picture of Light (1994), which would lead him towards his mature style of documentary practice. Picture of Light was made from an encounter with the Swiss artist-scientist-collector Andreas Züst, who charged Mettler with the quixotic task of capturing the aurora borealis on film, leading the pair to brave arctic temperatures and construct a special time-lapse camera system capable of operating in extreme conditions. Playful and philosophical, the film was praised by John Powers of Vogue as "an extraordinary piece of filmmaking. In an era when only one movie in a hundred has a single moment of visionary power, Picture of Light is bursting with them."

Mettler's most extensive work, however, is Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002), an epic, three-hour exploration of transcendence that moves across three continents and a wide range of subjects and locales, from ecstatic Christian worshippers at a convention near the Toronto airport, to a Las Vegas businessman who has invented an erotic chair, to people who retell stories of past lives and passed loved ones, to the pastoral Swiss countryside and recovering drug addicts living in Zurich, and finally the landscape and people of Southern India. Many of the themes of Gambling, Gods and LSD are followed-up in The End of Time (2012), which takes viewers to various exotic locations, including a particle collider in Switzerland, lava fields in Hawaii, and an interstellar observatory, in a mediation on the meaning of temporal experience.

Soon to be released in its entirety in 2025, While the Green Grass Grows is the director's most intimate film to date. An extraordinary 7 hour long documentary essay diary, divided into seven parts, with chapters one and six released in 2023. The already award-winning film is a loving and sincere gesture to his parents, carried out with the enormous trust in others and with the radically open mind that has always been at the centre of his life's work.

Mettler is also known as a key collaborator with many other Canadian filmmakers, including Atom Egoyan (Next of Kin, Family Viewing, Krapp's Last Tape), Bruce McDonald (Knock Knock), Patricia Rozema (Passion: A Letter in 16mm), Jeremy Podeswa, Nick de Pencier (Streetcar), and Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes). More recently, Mettler collaborated with Swiss filmmakers Stéphanie Barbey and Luc Peter as cinematographer and co-editor on Broken Land (2014), and with Emma Davie as co-director on Becoming Animal (2018). Following the completion of Gambling, Gods and LSD, Mettler became interested in developing an improvisational approach to cinematic montage within a live context, and has worked with the software company Derivative Inc. to develop a digital image-mixing software platform used in numerous performances in collaboration with a diverse array of artists in a wide range of locales. Some of Mettler's additional collaborators include Jane Siberry, Michael Ondaatje, Jim O'Rourke, Fred Frith, Werner Penzel, Albert Hoffman, Peter Weber, Greg Hermanovic, Andrea Nann, Peter Liechti, Gabriel Scotti, Vincent Hanni, Costanza Francavilla, Ritchie Hawtin, and Neil Young.

Mettler's films have been the focus of multiple retrospectives, including at Toronto International Film Festival, BAFICI, Lincoln Centre, Pacific Film Archive, Jeu de Paume Paris, Cinémathèque Suisse, Hot Docs, Festival dei Popoli, Kinoatelje Film Festival, and many other festivals and cinematheques. His awards include a 2003 Genie from the Academy of Canadian Cinema for Best Documentary, the La Sarraz Prize from Locarno, Grand Prix and Prix du Jeune Publique at Vision Du Réel, Grand Prize at Figueira da Foz Festival, and Best Film, Cinematography, and Writing at Hot Docs. His works have been the subject of two books: Making The Invisible Visible (1995), and Of This Place and Elsewhere: The Films and Photography of Peter Mettler (2006). In 2017, Picture Of Light was selected by TIFF as one of Canada's Essential 150 Films.