Peter Mettler

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Peter Mettler
Born Peter Mark Mettler
September 7, 1958 (1958-09-07) (age 49)
Toronto, Ontario
Occupation film director

Peter Mettler (Canadian-Swiss) (born September 7, 1958) is a critically acclaimed Canadian-Swiss film maker and interdisciplinary artist. His work bridges the gap between experimental, narrative, personal essay, and documentary. He has collaborated with an extensive range of international artists and has been honored with awards and retrospectives worldwide.[1]

Contents

[edit] Biography:

Peter Mettler was born in 1958 to Swiss parents and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He became interested in the power of film and images at an early age, making his first films, Super 8 #1 and Reverie, at the age of eighteen[2].

He went on to study cinema at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (1977-1982) where he made two short films, Lancalot Freely (1980) and Gregory (1981), and the award-winning feature film Scissere (1982).

It is at Ryerson where Mettler began to collaborate with many of his contemporaries. Further to his own work Mettler, an acclaimed cinematographer, shot the first two films of Atom Egoyan, and the early works of Patricia Rozema, Bruce McDonald, Jeremy Podeswa, Ron Mann, and many other independent film makers in the 1980s.

Mettler's subsequent films explore themes foreshadowed in his earliest works - the wonder and intrigue of human perception, technology’s ability to both liberate and enslave, the authenticity of experience through the illusion of cinema, the ephemeral essence that exists beyond a photographed subject, the ease at which reality slips into abstraction. These themes are the fabric which weave together such films as Mettler’s Eastern Avenue (1985), The Top of His Head (1989), Tectonic Plates (1991), Picture of Light (1994), and Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002).

[edit] Selected Filmography

Scissere (1982): While deploying a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of optical effects, Scissere renders the experiences of a mental patient who wanders outside his institutional confines for the first time in many years. He imagines himself inside the sensibilities of three people he randomly spots at a bus station – a young mother, a heroin addict and an entomologist.

Eastern Avenue (1985) An exploration of intuition, using film as a kind of audio-visual improvisation. The structure and innate "story" of the film were formed by the chronology of experiences and perceptions that emerged from a journey to Berlin, Portugal and Switzerland.

Tectonic Plates (1991) criss-crosses the globe -- from Venice to Paris, New York, Montreal and Scotland -- following Madeleine, a French Canadian painter, as varied and intricate events and individuals sculpt her life and art. The single image of Plate Tectonics -- the landmasses that support the earth's ever-shifting continents -- becomes a powerful metaphor for the evolution of human life and culture, of the forces and restraints that shape the way we think, act and feel.

Picture of Light (1994) An hallucinatory tale which documents a filmmaker’s journey to Canada’s arctic in search of the Northern Lights. While combining glimpses of the characters who live in this remote environment and the crew’s both comic and absurd attempts to deal with extremes, the film reflects upon the paradoxes involved in trying to capture the natural wonder of the Northern Lights on celluloid.

The Top of His Head (1989) The story of Gus Victor, a satellite dish salesman whose ordered world is turned upside down by a radical and alluring performance artist. A cryptic note left by Lucy leads Gus on a quest which draws him out of the tyranny of the material world to open his perceptions in the most unexpected and awesome ways.

Balifilm (1997) Mettler brings us into the world of the mystical and the unconscious through his exploration of this extraordinary culture. balifilm was originally commissioned as a musical performance, created from diary images and sounds collected in 1990 and 1992 while traveling on the island of Bali.

Gambling, Gods, and LSD (2002) A filmmaker’s inquiry into transcendence becomes a three-hour trip across countries and cultures, interconnecting people, places and times. From Toronto, the scene of his childhood, Peter Mettler sets out on a journey that includes evangelism at the airport strip, demolition in Las Vegas, tracings in the Nevada desert, chemistry and street life in Switzerland, and the coexistence of technology and divinity in contemporary India. Everywhere along the way, the same themes are to be 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.

[edit] Awards

Gambling, Gods and LSD -Visions du Reel, Nyon: Grand Prix & Prix du Publique -Vancouver International Festival: NFB Best Feature Documentary -Montreal Cinema Nouveau: NFB Best Documentary -Duisburger Filmwoche: 3SAT Prize for Best Documentary -Toronto International Film Festival Group: Top Twenty Canadian Films -FIPRESCI Documentary runner-up -Academy of Canadian Cinema: Genie Award: Best Documentary -Swiss Ministry of Culture: Award for Excellence in the Arts -Lincoln Center/Film Comment: One of the Year’s Best Films

Balifilm -Sonic Boom: Live performance with Evergreen Club Gamelan -Duisburger Filmwoche: Best Short Film -Visions du Reel: Opening Night Presentation

Picture of Light -Hot Docs Toronto: Best Film, Best Cinematography, &Best Writing -Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland: La Sarraz Prize -Swiss Ministry of Culture: Award for Excellence in the Arts -Figueira da Foz International Festival: Grand Prize (Images & Documents) -MCTV Award: Best Ontario Film -Yamagata International Documentary Festival: Award for Excellence

Tectonic Plates -Figuera da Foz: Most Innovative Film of the Festival -Mannheim Film Festival: Catholic Jury Award -Colombus, Ohio: Grand Prize & Award for Excellence

Scissere -Norman Maclaren Award; Best Student Film

[edit] Other Artistic Pursuits

Additional artistic activities include a wide range of ongoing engagements in music, dance and photography. Over the years Mettler has presented photographic gallery exhibitions in Europe and Canada. More recently he has been experimenting with live sound and image mixing performances with a diversity of musical artists in an extremity of locales ranging from radio theatres to dance clubs and wilderness locations. An interview with Mettler on these activities is included in the 2005 publication The VJ Book by Paul Spinrad. Mettler’s extensive body of photography can also be found on his website www.petermettler.com and in the book Of This Place and Elsewhere.

[edit] Collaborators

Past collaborators of various disciplines include Werner Penzel, Michael Ondaatje, Atom Egoyan, Peter Weber, Fred Frith, Jim O'Rourke, Alexandra Rockingham Gill, Robert Lepage, Andreas Züst, Bruce McDonald, Patricia Rozema, Andrea Nann, Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and many others.

[edit] Further reading

White, Jerry, Of This Place and Elsewhere, (Toronto: Wilfred Laurier University, 2006). ISBN 0-9689132-5-3

Pitschen, Salome, Annette Schøonholzer, Peter Mettler: Making the Invisible Visible", (

[edit] External Links