Picture of Light is exemplary of Peter Mettler's best work, probing humanity's deepest philosophical questions through a cinematic style that foregrounds the role of the camera in shaping our knowledge of the world. One particular scene illustrates this style perfectly: it begins with shots that survey the stillness of emerging night in the small northern town of Churchill, Manitoba. The filmmakers have come in search of the ecstatic bursts of Aurora Borealis occasionally unleashed in the skies overhead, and the entire film is premised upon the long waits and technical difficulties inherent in their quest to capture the lights on film. Mettler speaks in a personal tone on the voiceover while describing things at once banal and fantastic. As we listen, we slowly become witness to fleeting celestial formations rendered in time-lapse, a cinematic device that has become a signature mark of self-reflexivity while maintaining its ability to draw us into the film instead of acting as a distanciating effect. Throughout the scene we also hear Jim O'Rourke's ambient score providing a consistent tonal thread, which transcends any perceived distinctions between the film's constituent elements. Mettler ends the scene by saying: "we tell ourselves that seeing it on TV just isn't the same as being there," as though this were an idea that humans came up with to keep the boundary between reality and representation perfectly clear. But the boundary is not clear, and it never has been. The film does not suggest any incompatibility between a desire to keep the audience constantly aware of its own making while inducing the wonder that we might experience if we were to be in the filmmaker's position. The filming process is explained to us every step of the way, and there is no illusionist premise by which the filmmakers would want us to lose sight of the edges of the frame. So we are not confronted with the shock of disillusionment found high atop Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain. Our awareness of the filmmaking process is the process by which we become mesmerized. The genius of Mettler's style is that it allows us simultaneous access to the wonders of its subject and the means through which this subject is turned into the film itself. Mettler's style shows us that reflexivity does not have to jolt the audience out of rapture. Science does not have to negate magic. They are each part of the other, as inseparable as the elements of any film that attempts to show us something new in the world.
