Picture of Light

Mettler’s remarkable documentary about the northern lights is his most fully realized cinematic expression of his quest for a spiritual synthesis of “self and surround.” “Before science explained, the northern lights were spirits—a trigger for the imagination—images provided by nature framed by no less than the universe itself” (Mettler). In Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of the great arctic expanse, Mettler and his small film crew devised a way of photographing the aurora borealis. “In an era when only one movie in a hundred has a single moment of visionary power . . . Picture of Light is bursting with them” (John Powers, Vogue).