Sudbury Cinéfest
Year Result Award Category/Recipient(s)
1994 Won Best Ontario Feature
Peter Mettler

SYNOPSIS:
Picture Of Light is 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.
...aurora borealis... the lights with no bodies, pouring colours from the sky... images provided by nature more special than any special effect... Their majesty and mystery lead the film to a most unexpected and haunting finale which considers the future of our relationship to technology and Nature, in an increasingly artificial or "virtual" world...


 IMDb.............: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110831
 Year.............: 1994
 Country..........: Canada  | Switzerland
 Runtime..........: 83Minutes
 Audio............: ENGLISH: Dolby Digital Stereo
 Subtitles........: French, German (Sub+idx)

"The result of Mettler’s struggle with the elements is PICTURE OF LIGHT. It’s one of the most provocative and mesmerizing works at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.”
– Craig Macinnis, THE TORONTO STAR

“PICTURE OF LIGHT has the narrative innovation and esthetic brilliance of a good drama. Hypnotic displays  of the aurora borealis...are the gold at the end of Mettler’s rainbow, but getting there is more than half the fun. The film is an existential meditation on snow and space and cold, undercut by an absurdist wit... Mettler goes to a world where cameras freeze and tries to film nothingness, unbroken patterns of land and sky. He achieves amazing results. In the context of Canadian cinema, where characters often live in uneasy tension with their environment, for once there is no contest: the weather wins, hands down.”
– Brian D. Johnson, MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

“PICTURE OF LIGHT is luminous and genuinely transcendent...”
– Gerald Peary, SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE & MAIL

“Taking a tiny crew to study the aurora borealis from the chilly vantage point of Churchill, Manitoba...has resulted in one of the most original and breathtaking documentaries of the year. Neither conventional nor experimental, PICTURE OF LIGHT compels on a multitude of levels...where one of this country’s most immaculate image-makers, points his camera toward the most spectacular special effect the natural world has to offer, and brings back a piece of heaven. Highly recommended.”
– Geoff Pevere, THE GLOBE & MAIL

“An extraordinary piece of filmmaking. In an era when only one movie in a hundred has a single moment of visionary power, Peter Mettler’s PICTURE OF LIGHT is bursting with them..this is a film that takes you places you have never been.”
– John Powers, VOGUE critic

“PICTURE OF LIGHT has the narrative innovation and esthetic brilliance of a good drama. Hypnotic displays of the aurora borealis...are the gold at the end of Mettler’s rainbow, but getting there is more than half the fun. The film is an existential meditation on snow and space and cold, undercut by an absurdist wit...Mettler goes to a world where cameras freeze and tries to film nothingness, unbroken patterns of land and sky. He achieves amazing results...”
– Brian D. Johnson, MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

"...you sense you're watching a new art form in the process of creation...among the very best documentaries to come along in years...PICTURE OF LIGHT is an elegantly framed lyric by Peter Mettler about the North and the northern lights. At the very outset, the director hints there's deeper music to be heard here by introducing us to a camera designed especially for the deep cold. Spurred on by thoughts of a man he met at a part "who watches the shy", Mettler's PICTURE OF LIGHT is as much a meditation on documentary filmmaking as it is on the North."
– Peter Goddard, THE TORONTO STAR

"PICTURE OF LIGHT is the most beautiful fusion of art and science I've seen since Michael Snow's La Région Centrale".
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER critic

"PICTURE OF LIGHT confronts the ontological status of film, brandishing profundity, humour and many extraordinarily beautiful images, concluding finally that film's relationship to reality and experience is, in the best cases, rather like all of life's Big Questions -- puzzling, troubling, awe-inspiring."
– Peter Urquhart, REVERSE SHOT

"Personal, quirky, inquisitive and visually sophisticated, PICTURE OF LIGHT is Canadian writer/director Peter Mettler's investigative meditation on the aurora borealis -- the northern lights."
– David Armstrong, SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

"With his masterful new film about the aurora borealis, PICTURE OF LIGHT,  a breathtaking investigation of the powers and limits of film language, Mettler should assume his rightful, prominent place in contemporary Canadian cinema...From its title onward, PICTURE OF LIGHT articulates the paradox of the extraordinary film unspooling before us. In a voice over that at once affirms and questions its authoritative role in the documentary tradition, Mettler reminds us that his tools are inadequate and falsifying. We know he is right. We also know, as he does, that these picture of light, these simulacra, do inspire wonder, do remind us that for all our scientific marvels and technological advances, we remain unfinished and searching. In its meditative, marvelous simplicity, PICTURE OF LIGHT unmasks its frames, and demands that we look beyond them."
– Tom McSorley, TAKE ONE

“Mettler is slowly but surely affirming his presence as one of the most original cineastes of his generation. He is an auteur of the utmost importance…his adventurous cinema displays the veritable images of today.”
– Norbert Cruetz, JOURNAL DE GENEVE

“Like the curtains of light, like a thousand fractured searchlights in the night sky, like a halogen haze, like a neon fog, like… Peter Mettler’s camera has accelerated the meteorological phenomena; out of the majestic glow develops a squirrly light of insanity… an impression of endlessness, of no borders, of flight and the immaterial.”
– Martin Schaub, DAS MAGAZIN, ZURICH

“[Mettler makes] films that work with insinuation, films that speak to the heart of the viewer, to their memories and dreams by addressing their emotions and senses.”
– Martin Schaub, ZURICH TAGES ANZEIGER

“Mettler points at the world… engaging us in poetry and imagination… Like the first gestures of cinema, he is always perceiving the world as an object of endless fascination… Peter Mettler dreams with his eyes open, and in wanting to convey the elusive aurora borealis, he takes measure of the infinite as no camera has ever done before…”
– Jean Perret, SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE, LOCARNO

codec: DX50
res: 720x480
fps: 29.970030
avergae bitrate: 2174 kbps
audio: mpeg, 2 channels, 44100hz, 120kbps.
length: 1h23:18

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