"His peripatetic lens is ever gravitating toward outsiders in search of ecstatic states", writes José Teodoro in Brick, "strange spectacles that defy straightforward documentation, and sacred places that promise some metaphysical deliverance.
There are precedents for his methodologies—the films of Chris Marker and Werner Herzog come to mind—but Mettler’s gifts as an open and unobtrusive interviewer and his capacity to discover shared sensibilities between people of vastly diverse cultures and creeds feels singular.
"[2] Mettler has worked as a cinematographer on films by Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, Bruce McDonald, and Jennifer Baichwal, and has collaborated with numerous other artists, including Michael Ondaatje, Fred Frith, Jim O'Rourke, Jane Siberry, Robert Lepage, Edward Burtynsky, Greg Hermanovic, Richie Hawtin, Neil Young, Jeremy Narby, Franz Treichler and Emma Davie.
[5] Throughout the 1980s, in addition to working on his own personal projects, Mettler would also collaborate as a cinematographer on several key films in the Toronto New Wave cinema, such as Atom Egoyan's early features Next of Kin (1984) and Family Viewing (1987).
As with Mettler's subsequent films, The Top of His Head explores the nature of human perception and technology's ability to liberate and enslave experience through the power of recording media.
Rather than document a performance or adapt the stage narrative into screen drama, the film, shot on location in Venice, Scotland, and Montreal, "seeks to articulate cinematically the intersections of theatre and cinema, past and present, culture and nature, interior and exterior, representation and reality".
[8] "The result", writes Vit Wagner in the Toronto Star, "is an intriguing and visually tantalizing collage that bridges the two media in a way that structurally underscores Lepage's themes of convergence, separation and transformation".
Mettler took up the challenge, braving arctic temperatures and constructing a special time-lapse camera system capable of operating in severe nighttime conditions during the film's photography in Churchill, Manitoba.
Gambling, Gods and LSD Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002), an epic project some ten years in the making, is a three-hour long meditation on transcendence shot across three continents in a dizzying array of locations, including Toronto's airport strip, where Toronto Airport Fellowship Church congregates dance and swoon at an evangelical service, Las Vegas, where crowds gather to witness a demolition, Zürich, where addicts speak of their marginal existence, and southern India, where Mettler's approach to street life and worship becomes more observational.
Most recently, Mettler has toured across Europe performing Yoshtoyoshto, a live event fusing image, story, and music produced in collaboration with anthropologist Jeremy Narby and musician Franz Treichler.
"The object of the documentary isn't the vast domain of the oil sands, one visible from space and part of a post-terrestrial, post-human landscape", writes Georgiana Banita, "but something very human indeed, dependent on the viewers' ability to make sense, literally, of what they see on the surface of the earth, whose every mound and fracture the film painstakingly resisters".
The End of Time, writes critic Adam Nayman, "exists in the twilight zone that is home to much of the best non-fiction filmmaking: at once rousing and sobering, baffling and precise, epic and intimate".