Peter Mettler

Peter Mettler was born on September 7, 1958 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is a cinematographer and director 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 dram