Peter Mettler

Peter Mettler (born September 7, 1958 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian film director and cinematographer.^[1]

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.

He went on to study cinema at Ryerson University (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, and the ease at which reality slips into abstraction.

Films

• Scissere (1982)
• The Top of His Head (1989)
• Eastern Avenue (1985)
• Tectonic Plates (1991)
• Picture of Light (1994)
• Balifilm (1997)
• Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002)
• Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands (2009)
• The End of Time (2012)

References

Further reading

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

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

External links

• Official website
• Peter Mettler at the Internet Movie Database
• Canadian Film Encyclopedia – Peter Mettler
• Peter Mettler – Northern Stars