Picture of Light (1994)

Peter Mettler: Self - Cinematography and Direction, Narrator

Photos 

Quotes 

• Peter Mettler - Cinematography and Direction : I met a man at a dinner who loves to watch the sky. He'd spent as much time watching the sky as I had trying to point cameras and microphones out into the world. It seemed that both of us were trying to find an answer to a question we didn't yet know. As the night closed we agreed to share a path we had in common - the pursuit of wonder.

• Peter Mettler - Cinematography and Direction : Film. Media. With its potential to commodify, turn into commodity anything that is meaningful to us - business and numbers out of life force and wonder. Maybe this wacky process of harnessing money and technology is just an extension of thinking, of trying to understand. These images and sounds are articulations of experience. We look at them and try to decipher the reality that gave birth to them.

• Peter Mettler - Cinematography and Direction : It may well be that the Northern Lights cannot be filmed. That nature cannot be filmed. That film or media is in conflict with nature. Is it just a surrogate for the real thing? Is film a surrogate for real experience?

• Peter Mettler - Cinematography and Direction : You've probably heard that the Inuit have seventeen words for snow and ice, but in truth it is much closer to one hundred and seventy. Uguruguzak: grease ice, the earliest stage of freezing causes wind ripples to disappear from patches of the water surface. Maullik: slush ice or ice rind, heavy development of grease ice almost to the point of nilas. Pogazak: slush or mush ice formed by grinding along the edges of ice pans, floes or cracks. Mogozak: solidly frozen ice sometimes refered to as file ice due to the formations caused by the ice filing itself. Migalik: pancake ice, circular pieces of young ice with raised rims, the shape and appearance result from rotation and collision with other cakes. Salogok: nilas or black young ice, a thin flexible sheet of newly formed ice, which will not support a man, is weak enough for a seal to break through and gives way with one firm thrust of the oonak. Eyechektakok: a crack that is pulsating or opening and closing.

• Peter Mettler - Cinematography and Direction : We live in a time where things do not seem to exist unless they are contained as an image - but if you look into this darkness you may see the lights of your own retina. Not unlike the Northern Lights. Not unlike the movements of thought. Like a shapeless accumulation of everything we have ever seen.

• Peter Mettler - Cinematography and Direction : Because the earth is a giant magnet, somebody watching the lights in the southern hemisphere - at this moment - will see the exact mirror image of what we see here now.

• Peter Mettler - Cinematography and Direction : The Inuit say that the lights are the deceased coming out to greet the living.

• Peter Mettler - Cinematography and Direction : Ed says you can hear them. But Bill says all you can theoretically hear is static discharge. As though your head, being the highest point around this flat terrain, acted like some kind of conductor to the currents of the night sky. Or maybe it's our breath, freezing into tiny ice crystals, and falling upon our nylon parkas.

• Peter Mettler - Cinematography and Direction : Once again I struggle with the impulse to get my camera... but to simply watch instead...