In the cosmology of Canadian cinema, Peter Mettler is our seeker. From his early experimental narrative feature, Scissere, to his inventive adaptation of Robert Lepage’s Tectonic Plates, from his sprawling, Genie Award-winning essay film, Gambling, Gods and LSD, to his god’s-eye survey of the Alberta tar sands, Petropolis, Mettler has maintained a constant forge into the terra incognita of the transcendental. Applying equal rigour to preparation and improvisation, Mettler’s peripatetic lens is ever gravitating toward outsiders in search of ecstatic states, strange spectacles that defy straightforward documentation, and sacred places that promise some metaphysical deliverance. With the release of the auteur’s latest and most ambitious film, While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts, there has never been a better time to discover Mettler’s singular body of work.
The product of eleven years of conversations with playwright and author José Teodoro, undertaken in various locations in Mettler’s two home countries of Canada and Switzerland, Nothing But Time explores this extraordinary artist’s life and practice, which brims with tales of uncanny coincidence, dynamic collaborations with fellow artists such as Atom Egoyan, Jennifer Baichwal, and Jim O’Rourke, and countless encounters with visionaries from the worlds of science and spirituality. In Mettler’s story, the yearning for knowledge is balanced with the surrender to boundless mystery, until the tenets that guide his art and life dissolve and cohere in an uncommon commitment to cultivating our collective sense of wonder.