Picture this

Mettler trips the northern light fantastic

Toronto's Peter Mettler, two of whose films will be shown at the Harvard Film Archive December 19 through 23, is a brilliant cinematographer, editor, sound designer. However, his works suffer because, trying to do all, he's a self-conscious, awkward scenarist.

Mettler's 1989 narrative film, The Top of His Head, which he shot, directed, and wrote, is, let's be frank, tough to sit through. A vapid Godardian-Antonionian take on architecturally alienated modern Toronto is welded to a thin, extremely pretentious story of a twirpy young business executive. Skip it. But don't miss Picture of Light, Mettler's dazzling 1994 feature-documentary journey to Northern Canada to witness the aurora borealis. It's worth holding tight through the filmmaker's heavy-toned, often banal voice-over: "At the beginning of life there was only the real thing. Now there is media which records, regurgitates, preserves, dictates, and expresses. We know what is by what is represented as much as by what we have seen ourselves."

Shut out the soupy words and watch the skies. What a head trip! Up above, things are whipped-up and manic, a torrent of custardy clouds and dipping stars, a singing and dancing of the cosmos electric, a Lucy-in-the-sky Space Odyssey, photographed with boots frozen in the firmament.

Mettler's crew shot in the February snow in Churchill, Manitoba, 3000 miles up through Canada at the Arctic Circle. Picture of Light's time-lapse tracking of the aurora borealis is the most fabulous light show you'll ever see.

And there's more. The train trip north to get there is almost as visually sublime, Mettler's sensual, kinetic collage of tracks, trestles, huffing engines, and a film crew nervous for transcendent adventure. Some of the crew are Swiss-German, giving the voyage a distinctly ballsy Werner Herzog flavor. (The voice-over, when it succeeds, as in Mettler's mesmerizing explanations of the Inuit typology of snow, seems Wim Wenders/Peter Handke-like.)

Who lives in this Northern Canadian town having the first pre-fab building in North America, a church? The weirdest dude in Churchill (here the film moves into Errol Morris territory) is a newly pacifist hunter who, after explaining that the way to make a huskie happy is to rub it between its toes, confesses his sanguinary past. Until recently, he was a serial killer of Arctic game, ghoulishly into "blood-bathing": "That's when you kill any animal any time of year, either for pleasure or for visual satisfaction."

Picture of Light features remarkable meetings with snowbound locals, including the walrus-moustached Croatian innkeeper of the Churchill Motel and Hotel, a Catholic priest, and spaced-out Inuits. None seems bothered by the sameness of life, unlike the outsider movie crew, who, bored, engage in a curious experiment. They put a rifle hole into the wall of a motel room and then wait to see whether the room fills up with snow. It doesn't.

FROM AN INTERVIEW with a prominent film personality:

Q: You watch TV?

A: Yes, a great deal. . . . I'm no bookworm. Never have been, never will be. But of everything to do with pictures and images, I'm omnivorous.

Steven Spielberg? Adam Sandler? Pauly Shore? Actually, this is from the 1970 book Bergman on Bergman. Yes, Sweden's maestro filmmaker can be a little dumb; and Ingmar's gone and done it again, by going back unwisely on his directorial retirement to make The Last Gasp (1995), an extremely minor drama for Swedish television that plays at the Harvard Film Archive December 15 through 21.

Bergman's impulse was a decent one: to inform people about Swedish silent-film maker Georg af Klercker, a prolific director of comedies and thrillers between 1916 and 1918. Bergman considers him equal to his famous directorial contemporaries, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller. Klercker's career came to a halt back then when, only 42, he ran afoul of Sweden's magnate producer, Charles Magnusson.

Bergman's playlet imagines a meeting between them in Magnusson's office. Klercker talks and talks, acts like a clown, pleads, cajoles, insults, begs for a chance to make more movies. Magnusson hardly replies, but in Strindbergian terms he's "the stronger," with all the power.

The Last Gasp isn't much of a drama, and it's hard to imagine any audience, certainly not an American one, who will get emotionally stirred by the Griffith-era plight of this unknown Swedish filmmaker.

Ingmar, try again. How about Persona 2?

INDIES IN SAN FRANCISCO have been making, since 1992, a new version of the Bonnie-and-Clyde saga called The Barrow Gang. I was sent a seven-minute sample reel that in black-and-white, features some torrid action and arresting unknowns as bandit outlaws. Want to get involved in production financing? Call Pacific Films at (415) 355-5872.