Picture of Light

Picture of Light -- On two occasions in 1991, Canadian film maker, Peter Mettler, traveled to Churchill, Manitoba to film the aurora borealis.  The resulting film plays like a Canadian version of Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana, less overtly lunatic, rather more polite, less obsessive-compulsive but more attentive to truth, verity being a value that Herzog disdains. (It is also possible that Mettler's approach to his subject, in part the nightmare cold and isolation of Churchill, influenced Herzog's Antarctic documentary, Encounters at the End of the World.)  Mettler, or a surrogate, pronounces a lyrical voice-over to the images and the pictures are stark, icy, and often very beautiful -- I have never seen a film that better conveys the sensation of sub-zero cold:  we see the shadowy snowdrifts grey at down, watch a man rhythmically rocking back and forth as he tries to start his car and we hear the distinctive squeak of boots on super-cold snow in one alrming scene in which the film maker tracks a meteorologist walking through an icy labyrinth of deeply furrowed drifts in the darkness.  The film has three apparent subjects -- the arduous difficulty of filming at minus 27 degrees Celsius, the Northern Lights shown in all their incandescent majesty both from the steppe and from 195 miles in space (from the Challenger flight-deck), and the eccentric loners living in Churchill.  In one scene, clearly influenced by Herzog, a man fires a rifle through a motel door to test whether the snow from a blizzard outside will penetrate the room through the bullet-hole -- it does, making a razor-edge snowdrift that cuts the motel room in half, a surrealist image worthy of Bunuel.  The soundtrack doesn't match images -- in some scenes, we hear one person talking while another witness gestures to the camera.  From Herzog's bag of tricks, we get a long passage in an Inuit language that is not translated; the camera shows us heaps of pack ice.  Mettler's narration is rhapsodic and associative:  the aurora signify to the film maker thoughts flickering in the darkness of the mind, images projected on a great black screen, a spray of magnetized electrons like that on the blurryTV screens we see in the empty rooms filled with Arctic kitsch.  A man's toes suffer 4th degree frost bite and will auto-amputate -- we see the fellow motionless in bed, but cheerfully talking to the camera.  Every evanescent flicker of light over the North Pole is exactly mirrored by an identical fluxion in the magnetosphere at the South Pole.  Did you know that?