Silvan’s Cine School 2006, saturday May 27th
The Never Ending Journays
Maybe there is a lot mankind already knows. But it seems that we are finally searching for something that gives us warmth and justifies our personal existence. Peter Mettler begins his journey years ago to find answers while meeting different persons and listening their responds. Starting in the USA we take part of one possible way: In a great room the people pray, dance and fall into trance to feel united. In Las Vegas instead the search for God is substituted by gambling and some kind of new and more un-personal sexual experiences. But in the end the feeling of loneliness returns and in the atmosphere of an all time aware control system comes along with fear to trust the others. We meet further people and listen to there ideas, and also they are travelers. So the journey goes on and out of the clouds arise like a paradise: Switzerland. We are sitting with a friendly couple at the bank of a river and listen to their experiences with drugs. Meeting also scientists and feeling the forces of wild nature, we cannot get away from »Gambling, Gods and LSD«, as we are already part of the adventure onto our own longings. On our way to India we enter into scenes of daily life that seems far away but express the same human needs. When the camera takes us on the boot and a young boy runs along the river side, to have the chance to watch us for some more moments, he becomes a traveler like us. At the end, he remains back and while listening to the Indian night breaking on we realize, that also we cannot go on watching the film for ever as it is already ending. It gets dark in the cinema and the sound fades out but you can feel inside of you the wish to travel on, even this time in your own life. Peter Mettlers »Gambling, Gods and LSD« has the mystical power to take you along on your own way of life to find more of yourself.
Julius Bauer
Gambling, Gods and LSD: What is a travel?
What does it mean to travel? Maybe it means find pleasure in a place far from themselves. But also a metaphor to find something that don’t ‘’use'’ often: the pleasure. In the place where we go, we want to find a part of us that we ignore it usually. It’s our culture to imposes it.
Peter Mettler, set out on a journey through many different country: Toronto, than Las Vegas, Zurigo and in the end, India. All the people of the world wants to express his way to approach to the other half of themselves. They want to free their spiritual essence. There are a lot of way to do that. They want to approach with the Nature non trough the knowledge, but trough the mind opening. Mettler meets up with several possible ways to look for God. We find out about a sect in Toronto that is dealing with the same mechanisms that are described by Hofmann (the scientist that studied the LSD effects). Their need for abstraction goes hand in hand with the dancing crowd at the Street-Parade in Zurgo. The synthetic drugs and religious fanaticism have the same roots. In the movie we find also moments of poetry. A man who telling about his death wife, during put on his hands the bones of her. After that, we see an airplane that flies over the clouds. Las Vegas gives a different meaning of the pleasure. There is nothing of the mysticism. It is a really city built for the material pleasure. When a old hotel is blasting, we can remind the Twin Towers, but in this occasion, the people is present at a ceremony, a big happy event! In the end, the journey ends in India, where Mettler tells to a men the reason of this ‘trip’.
Alice Rispoli
Gamblers, gods and LSD
Even though the film, which was the project of Peter Mettler’s life, as he spent years on making it, and the theme - as it praises the richness of the imagination and is in love with the scenery of planet, produced either by nature either by humankind - could easily end up into a self-satisfied three hours long epopee, it surprises with the liveliness not only inside of the movie but also in its relation towards the audience. It encourages them to link - sometimes illogically associated - images into their own interpretation. The camera intensively penetrates not only the intimacy of recorded individuals but somehow also the viewers themselves as it shows – technically and consequently philosophically - that it is no wrong, but almost urgent, to change the point of view from which we are observing the happening. Even if partly it presents us as small and therefore not unique pieces of a giant organism, that doesn’t reduce the importance of our position in it. Actually, we are almost obliged to walk through as many secret corridors of our (sub)conscious as possible and not accept explanations from authorities or already established concepts, because this could put an end to the development. And as it is very difficult to define the film as a genre, the author fully proves that.
Ana Javornik
Gambling, Gods and LSD
Introspective comment documentary challenging dreams, desires, fear, death and which very persuasively escapes to any genre or firm classification. Divided into four parts we get very sensitively introduced into different personal situation, starting from a drug addict in Toronto, moving into the (un)spectacular desert of Las Vegas, then to Switzerland Mettler parents native country and finally southern India. Sensitive, intimate, unusual and very close atmosphere, full of juxtaposed images are the main characteristics of this mixture of experimental and at the same time autobiographical documentary with director s comment in the off. All, in a way facing human weaknesses, trying their own path of self realization through the bunch of artificially invented supplies to fulfill our overgrown (un)material desires. Everyone dealing up with their own “personal Jesus” in a subtle and gentle manner of emanating reality.
Biljana Pavlovič
Gambling, gods and LSD
Follow your heart
The film is a beautiful trip trough our subconscious. It wakes up the kid inside us and all of the questions that we forgot to ask ourselves. It shows us, how people are searching for pleasure and passion in all possible ways. Through gambling, gods, LSD and a lot of other stuff. The author uses a question: What is the difference between looking for what you want and just looking. Film is a masterpiece that reminds us that all the pleasure that we are searching for is always at the place where we are at that exact time. The biggest question exposed is a question of death. We are pulled in a dilema of good and bad. It makes us question ourselves about the years that we spend living. The use of colors in this film, I would say, is on a very high level, they are always telling us what we want to know. They are speaking in a melancholic tones when the atmosphere in the film is sad or desperate and on the other hand in euphoric ones when showing us all the different pleasures. The film is, as I have said already, a trip. It takes us in the authors future and past. We are directed to follow good and bad things that he already has and he is about to experience. Here is another Indian wise thought used in the film. It is their way of saying how are you actually. Their first question when they see another person is ‘Where are you going?’ And the answer ‘Over there.’ So the film reminds us, that we think that we are individuals and that we have different paths to follow. It is telling us, to follow our hearts.
Nejc Sajovic
Gambling, Gods and LSD
Gambling, Gods and LSD are different ways to come out of reality reaching a place where our subjectivity can be liberated. The author is having a travel himself into the deepest humanity, with a quite anthropological approach and a particular use of images. He is interested in composing geometrical frames and keeping the point of interest out of focus. We are going towards a state of higher knowledge where Space and Time are modified as the accelerated shooting across the Monument Valley shows. There is a quite abstract aspect in the way of watching real like the plongee’ shot with the cards players in Las Vegas tables. Peter Mettler organizes the material he collected during the years in order to give a universal consolation to the human kind. He is explaining we are rather different each other but similar in the very need of safety and in the continuous searching for something could raise our mind giving us tranquility or pleasure. There is no judge or judgment, there is just a collage of human experiences, sexual pleasure is mixed with religious songs, Albert Hofmann (the inventor of LSD) with the head of a sect, there are no Time distinctions, Egyptian pyramids are closed to modern structures, the lyrical tone with the documentary one. The travel finishes in India, discussing with a fishing man in a boat along the river. There, in the water, where everything has started.
Paolo Bernardi
Gambling, Gods and LSD
A Matter of Life and Death?
With so many hints spread inside the movie, it’s not so easy to take out a precise fil rouge able to justify the presence of all. Many of them, anyway, can be linked to the concept of travel: not only the director’s one, made by going from Canada to India, but even those of the natural elements (the streams and the falls, the wind on the sand…) and the one symbolized by the recurring planes crossing the sky. Besides this, the idea of movement, in this case a metaphysical one, is present also in the speeches of almost each of the characters to whom Mettler calls upon: some, like the pair portrayed in the first sequence, seem to look for a way to meet the divine; others, like the widower still strongly bound to the memory of his wife, try as well to establish a connection with another (and once again unworldly) dimension; others, like the visionary girl interviewed in Las Vegas or the junkie one in Zurich, seem simply to look for a manner to leave behind a life in which they’re not at ease anymore. So, being it indifferently an attempt to reach something higher (and maybe the planes’ images are a metaphor of this) or an escape, and using as means faith, drugs, sex or any other kind of excess, the common point seem to be the shift between normal life and another kind of existence (or non-existence). However, this doesn’t suffice to explain the meaning of the last sequence, the one set in India. But here one of the final scenes assists us: it’s when the camera rotates on its axis framing vertically the bank of a river and its reflection in the water. Could it be another metaphor, in this case of the substantial closeness of the two dimensions? Just the portrait of Indian society, with its old rituals and the acceptance of the most dramatic sides of life, can give us a confirmation in this sense.
Piervittorio Vitori
Exits from reality
Gambling, Gods and LSD
It is a bit strange, but I found two analogies with the book in the film that in its content has nothing to do with books or with that form of expression at all. The first resemblance is in the way the film is divided in chapters, with few second breaks in transition from one chapter to another, or just small blank pauses for taking breath in passes from subchapters. The second one is in the Balzacian technique of entering into the story through the wider cadre and than introducing the character. The episode starts with recording of the nature landscape representing the opposition to the story that will be developed through the episode.
The author travels to the four parts of the world attentively watching people he meets, carefully digging their stories out and all of them, so different from each other, are put together with fine strings of fantasy that envelopes them and tights them in a solid net consisting of the desire to escape from reality and trying to find the fulfilment in the outer world, in the fanatic belief in higher power, in God, in drugs, in disaster, in pornography, in self-destruction… Author approaches his collocutors with the curious eye of the camera, and with all of them he achieves to create relationship of full confidence deserved with honesty and unspoiled, child like, interest that carries no burden of prejudices and judgements. His interest in them is live, pure, strong and persistent like the water - the light-motive of the film. His presence, as a proof of his personal engagement and as a proof that he is also the part of that universal story are rare bribes of narration in ‘I’ form where he isn’t trying to impose or explain anything, but just questioning and thus expressing full comprehension and respect towards the worlds he crosses through and everyone he meets on his way.
Antonija Letinić
Gambling, Gods and LSD
A film lasting for three hours sounds not too inviting if you don’t know what to expect from it. But the more fascinating it gets when you leave the cinema with the impression that time is passing differently in the Odeon than in the outside world: three hours elapsed in a rush and the feeling persists that you have seen more of the human psyche than at other times. Such an impression mediates the film by Peter Mettler who records his enquiry of the human struggle to come to terms with the human existence as such. The result is a panoptic vision of human fears and their way to find solution in Las Vegas, religion and drugs showing how all humans are connected by the impulse to find a meaning in their lives and a place in the world. His project leads him from Canada over the United States and Switzerland to finally end up in South India treating the people he meets on his way with sensitiveness and respect. Mettler builds his film upon different existential themes and symbols that keep recurring throughout the movie and still the impression grips you that Mettler is just driven by his intuition and the coincidences of life.
Barbara Laner
Peter Mettler: Gambling, gods and LSD
Life is not enough
Through four stations of the journey, Toronto-Las Vegas-Switzerland-India, Peter Mettler made a film »abut a state of people«, during which he tried to find out peoples greatest desires, fears, sorrows and passions. Although dealing with basic human concerns, by using open and simple dialogues he gets straight and sincere confessions, or he’s patiently filming them, letting them tell the story and the camera to document it. In Toronto he’s silently shooting a fanatical religious community of people, during which the camera is very realistically, but without a commentary showing the mass hypnosis of their members. In Las Vegas he’s interviewing the owner of the sex shop which is exploring the electronic possibilities to improve the human sexuality. In Switzerland he’s meeting two former heroin addicts, talking about the heights where this drug takes you to. It is only few subjects that I will mention here and there are mostly finding themselves in the extreme situations, like a wedding couple whose doing bungee jumping, the man who lost his wife and keeps her bones in her favorite scarf, or a woman who saw Jesus. All the subjects are shown in fighting against the solitude and egoistically seeking for pleasure or some other, life more »real« than their own. Some of them are looking for this other life in extreme sports, some of them in religion, drugs, nature or animals. Each part of the film is so well filmed and told and it clearly shows the long and detailed research which was taken before shooting and the great patience of the director. (Although I’m actually not suppose to write this, I have a strong desire to say, that the film »Gambling, gods and LSD« is a real masterpiece of the film, which is balancing on the edges of documentary genre and that I would definitely recommend it.)
Janja Sesar
Gambling, Gods and LSD
Contemplation of Film and the Viewer
It seems like there is one passion connecting and unifying all people on the world: the search for the divine, happiness and transcendence of brute reality. This forms the main guideline that connects the cinematic collage from places as diverse as Las Vegas and India that Peter Mettler shot on his long voyage. A picture that combines so different footage as religious gatherings, where people fall in trance, explosions of buildings and interviews of drug addicts is hold together exactly by this “central human occupation”. In the personal “confessions” of the people while facing the camera, one can clearly discover Metller’s sensitive approach to this intimate theme, who was seemingly deeply engaged with what he was doing. While being in a way a documentary film it is significant what stress the director gave on searching visually expressive and experimental visual forms rather than talk and the well chosen and masterly mixed music that in some parts gives you the impression of watching a video art or VJ screening. It is through this that the audience is grasped in the cinematic reality, which, one could say, becomes the reality itself, since it deeply concerns all of us. So for instance the stress on universal unity that is communicated through all the rituals and also scientific talks, grasps the “external” viewer himself, who comes in touch with the movie and the audience in the cinema itself.
Martin Marzidovšek
The Wild Blue Yonder
The thing I found most amusing and fascinating about The Wild Blue Yonder is the fact that it uses real footage and documentary style to build up a bizarre fantasy world. The film is a collage of NASA’s recordings, old black-and-white shots depicting historical events and impressions of the underwater world, tied up together only by a first person narrator – a human-like alien who is telling us a story about how he came to Earth and how humans are now (stupidly) trying to colonize his deserted home planet Andromeda. His story, spoken furiously directly at us or through a voice-over narration makes a new, coherent whole from all the documentary footage and gives it a whole new meaning. He even backs it up by interviews with (supposedly real-life) scientists arguing a bunch of crazy space theories. Herzog is subverting reality to create a new one and seems like he is trying to show us how the truth is always in the eyes of the beholder.
Špela Barlič
Gambling, Gods and LSD
What to say to a film that is not actually telling us some special story which tries to be an allegory of something or a piece of art but is confronting us immediately with life and the joy of being alive just as it is? Because this is how Peter Mettler made a movie out of nothing but life and in order to let us being part he creates an atmosphere firstly in his work but secondly also between work and audience where there is nothing in between: because of him filming and interviewing different people at four different places all over the world in a honest and most intimate way, he seems to make visible what really is affecting and motivating us: finding a way to other people, to nature, to yourself and even to god but not only finding the way but also then seeing yourself as being part of them and as becoming one altogether.
It took the director four years to finish his work and as movie it lasts for three hours but nevertheless without pointing out especially what was mentioned before he makes us feel all this by using a variety of impressions of nature, human beings and life and because of this the movie becomes a little piece of art. Just as life is itself.
Susanne Pedarnig
The Never Ending Journays
Maybe there is a lot mankind already knows. But it seems that we are finally searching for something that gives us warmth and justifies our personal existence. Peter Mettler begins his journey years ago to find answers while meeting different persons and listening their responds. Starting in the USA we take part of one possible way: In a great room the people pray, dance and fall into trance to feel united. In Las Vegas instead the search for God is substituted by gambling and some kind of new and more un-personal sexual experiences. But in the end the feeling of loneliness returns and in the atmosphere of an all time aware control system comes along with fear to trust the others. We meet further people and listen to there ideas, and also they are travelers. So the journey goes on and out of the clouds arise like a paradise: Switzerland. We are sitting with a friendly couple at the bank of a river and listen to their experiences with drugs. Meeting also scientists and feeling the forces of wild nature, we cannot get away from »Gambling, Gods and LSD«, as we are already part of the adventure onto our own longings. On our way to India we enter into scenes of daily life that seems far away but express the same human needs. When the camera takes us on the boot and a young boy runs along the river side, to have the chance to watch us for some more moments, he becomes a traveler like us. At the end, he remains back and while listening to the Indian night breaking on we realize, that also we cannot go on watching the film for ever as it is already ending. It gets dark in the cinema and the sound fades out but you can feel inside of you the wish to travel on, even this time in your own life. Peter Mettlers »Gambling, Gods and LSD« has the mystical power to take you along on your own way of life to find more of yourself.
Julius Bauer
Gambling, Gods and LSD: What is a travel?
What does it mean to travel? Maybe it means find pleasure in a place far from themselves. But also a metaphor to find something that don’t ‘’use'’ often: the pleasure. In the place where we go, we want to find a part of us that we ignore it usually. It’s our culture to imposes it.
Peter Mettler, set out on a journey through many different country: Toronto, than Las Vegas, Zurigo and in the end, India. All the people of the world wants to express his way to approach to the other half of themselves. They want to free their spiritual essence. There are a lot of way to do that. They want to approach with the Nature non trough the knowledge, but trough the mind opening. Mettler meets up with several possible ways to look for God. We find out about a sect in Toronto that is dealing with the same mechanisms that are described by Hofmann (the scientist that studied the LSD effects). Their need for abstraction goes hand in hand with the dancing crowd at the Street-Parade in Zurgo. The synthetic drugs and religious fanaticism have the same roots. In the movie we find also moments of poetry. A man who telling about his death wife, during put on his hands the bones of her. After that, we see an airplane that flies over the clouds. Las Vegas gives a different meaning of the pleasure. There is nothing of the mysticism. It is a really city built for the material pleasure. When a old hotel is blasting, we can remind the Twin Towers, but in this occasion, the people is present at a ceremony, a big happy event! In the end, the journey ends in India, where Mettler tells to a men the reason of this ‘trip’.
Alice Rispoli
Gamblers, gods and LSD
Even though the film, which was the project of Peter Mettler’s life, as he spent years on making it, and the theme - as it praises the richness of the imagination and is in love with the scenery of planet, produced either by nature either by humankind - could easily end up into a self-satisfied three hours long epopee, it surprises with the liveliness not only inside of the movie but also in its relation towards the audience. It encourages them to link - sometimes illogically associated - images into their own interpretation. The camera intensively penetrates not only the intimacy of recorded individuals but somehow also the viewers themselves as it shows – technically and consequently philosophically - that it is no wrong, but almost urgent, to change the point of view from which we are observing the happening. Even if partly it presents us as small and therefore not unique pieces of a giant organism, that doesn’t reduce the importance of our position in it. Actually, we are almost obliged to walk through as many secret corridors of our (sub)conscious as possible and not accept explanations from authorities or already established concepts, because this could put an end to the development. And as it is very difficult to define the film as a genre, the author fully proves that.
Ana Javornik
Gambling, Gods and LSD
Introspective comment documentary challenging dreams, desires, fear, death and which very persuasively escapes to any genre or firm classification. Divided into four parts we get very sensitively introduced into different personal situation, starting from a drug addict in Toronto, moving into the (un)spectacular desert of Las Vegas, then to Switzerland Mettler parents native country and finally southern India. Sensitive, intimate, unusual and very close atmosphere, full of juxtaposed images are the main characteristics of this mixture of experimental and at the same time autobiographical documentary with director s comment in the off. All, in a way facing human weaknesses, trying their own path of self realization through the bunch of artificially invented supplies to fulfill our overgrown (un)material desires. Everyone dealing up with their own “personal Jesus” in a subtle and gentle manner of emanating reality.
Biljana Pavlovič
Gambling, gods and LSD
Follow your heart
The film is a beautiful trip trough our subconscious. It wakes up the kid inside us and all of the questions that we forgot to ask ourselves. It shows us, how people are searching for pleasure and passion in all possible ways. Through gambling, gods, LSD and a lot of other stuff. The author uses a question: What is the difference between looking for what you want and just looking. Film is a masterpiece that reminds us that all the pleasure that we are searching for is always at the place where we are at that exact time. The biggest question exposed is a question of death. We are pulled in a dilema of good and bad. It makes us question ourselves about the years that we spend living. The use of colors in this film, I would say, is on a very high level, they are always telling us what we want to know. They are speaking in a melancholic tones when the atmosphere in the film is sad or desperate and on the other hand in euphoric ones when showing us all the different pleasures. The film is, as I have said already, a trip. It takes us in the authors future and past. We are directed to follow good and bad things that he already has and he is about to experience. Here is another Indian wise thought used in the film. It is their way of saying how are you actually. Their first question when they see another person is ‘Where are you going?’ And the answer ‘Over there.’ So the film reminds us, that we think that we are individuals and that we have different paths to follow. It is telling us, to follow our hearts.
Nejc Sajovic
Gambling, Gods and LSD
Gambling, Gods and LSD are different ways to come out of reality reaching a place where our subjectivity can be liberated. The author is having a travel himself into the deepest humanity, with a quite anthropological approach and a particular use of images. He is interested in composing geometrical frames and keeping the point of interest out of focus. We are going towards a state of higher knowledge where Space and Time are modified as the accelerated shooting across the Monument Valley shows. There is a quite abstract aspect in the way of watching real like the plongee’ shot with the cards players in Las Vegas tables. Peter Mettler organizes the material he collected during the years in order to give a universal consolation to the human kind. He is explaining we are rather different each other but similar in the very need of safety and in the continuous searching for something could raise our mind giving us tranquility or pleasure. There is no judge or judgment, there is just a collage of human experiences, sexual pleasure is mixed with religious songs, Albert Hofmann (the inventor of LSD) with the head of a sect, there are no Time distinctions, Egyptian pyramids are closed to modern structures, the lyrical tone with the documentary one. The travel finishes in India, discussing with a fishing man in a boat along the river. There, in the water, where everything has started.
Paolo Bernardi
Gambling, Gods and LSD
A Matter of Life and Death?
With so many hints spread inside the movie, it’s not so easy to take out a precise fil rouge able to justify the presence of all. Many of them, anyway, can be linked to the concept of travel: not only the director’s one, made by going from Canada to India, but even those of the natural elements (the streams and the falls, the wind on the sand…) and the one symbolized by the recurring planes crossing the sky. Besides this, the idea of movement, in this case a metaphysical one, is present also in the speeches of almost each of the characters to whom Mettler calls upon: some, like the pair portrayed in the first sequence, seem to look for a way to meet the divine; others, like the widower still strongly bound to the memory of his wife, try as well to establish a connection with another (and once again unworldly) dimension; others, like the visionary girl interviewed in Las Vegas or the junkie one in Zurich, seem simply to look for a manner to leave behind a life in which they’re not at ease anymore. So, being it indifferently an attempt to reach something higher (and maybe the planes’ images are a metaphor of this) or an escape, and using as means faith, drugs, sex or any other kind of excess, the common point seem to be the shift between normal life and another kind of existence (or non-existence). However, this doesn’t suffice to explain the meaning of the last sequence, the one set in India. But here one of the final scenes assists us: it’s when the camera rotates on its axis framing vertically the bank of a river and its reflection in the water. Could it be another metaphor, in this case of the substantial closeness of the two dimensions? Just the portrait of Indian society, with its old rituals and the acceptance of the most dramatic sides of life, can give us a confirmation in this sense.
Piervittorio Vitori
Exits from reality
Gambling, Gods and LSD
It is a bit strange, but I found two analogies with the book in the film that in its content has nothing to do with books or with that form of expression at all. The first resemblance is in the way the film is divided in chapters, with few second breaks in transition from one chapter to another, or just small blank pauses for taking breath in passes from subchapters. The second one is in the Balzacian technique of entering into the story through the wider cadre and than introducing the character. The episode starts with recording of the nature landscape representing the opposition to the story that will be developed through the episode.
The author travels to the four parts of the world attentively watching people he meets, carefully digging their stories out and all of them, so different from each other, are put together with fine strings of fantasy that envelopes them and tights them in a solid net consisting of the desire to escape from reality and trying to find the fulfilment in the outer world, in the fanatic belief in higher power, in God, in drugs, in disaster, in pornography, in self-destruction… Author approaches his collocutors with the curious eye of the camera, and with all of them he achieves to create relationship of full confidence deserved with honesty and unspoiled, child like, interest that carries no burden of prejudices and judgements. His interest in them is live, pure, strong and persistent like the water - the light-motive of the film. His presence, as a proof of his personal engagement and as a proof that he is also the part of that universal story are rare bribes of narration in ‘I’ form where he isn’t trying to impose or explain anything, but just questioning and thus expressing full comprehension and respect towards the worlds he crosses through and everyone he meets on his way.
Antonija Letinić
Gambling, Gods and LSD
A film lasting for three hours sounds not too inviting if you don’t know what to expect from it. But the more fascinating it gets when you leave the cinema with the impression that time is passing differently in the Odeon than in the outside world: three hours elapsed in a rush and the feeling persists that you have seen more of the human psyche than at other times. Such an impression mediates the film by Peter Mettler who records his enquiry of the human struggle to come to terms with the human existence as such. The result is a panoptic vision of human fears and their way to find solution in Las Vegas, religion and drugs showing how all humans are connected by the impulse to find a meaning in their lives and a place in the world. His project leads him from Canada over the United States and Switzerland to finally end up in South India treating the people he meets on his way with sensitiveness and respect. Mettler builds his film upon different existential themes and symbols that keep recurring throughout the movie and still the impression grips you that Mettler is just driven by his intuition and the coincidences of life.
Barbara Laner
Peter Mettler: Gambling, gods and LSD
Life is not enough
Through four stations of the journey, Toronto-Las Vegas-Switzerland-India, Peter Mettler made a film »abut a state of people«, during which he tried to find out peoples greatest desires, fears, sorrows and passions. Although dealing with basic human concerns, by using open and simple dialogues he gets straight and sincere confessions, or he’s patiently filming them, letting them tell the story and the camera to document it. In Toronto he’s silently shooting a fanatical religious community of people, during which the camera is very realistically, but without a commentary showing the mass hypnosis of their members. In Las Vegas he’s interviewing the owner of the sex shop which is exploring the electronic possibilities to improve the human sexuality. In Switzerland he’s meeting two former heroin addicts, talking about the heights where this drug takes you to. It is only few subjects that I will mention here and there are mostly finding themselves in the extreme situations, like a wedding couple whose doing bungee jumping, the man who lost his wife and keeps her bones in her favorite scarf, or a woman who saw Jesus. All the subjects are shown in fighting against the solitude and egoistically seeking for pleasure or some other, life more »real« than their own. Some of them are looking for this other life in extreme sports, some of them in religion, drugs, nature or animals. Each part of the film is so well filmed and told and it clearly shows the long and detailed research which was taken before shooting and the great patience of the director. (Although I’m actually not suppose to write this, I have a strong desire to say, that the film »Gambling, gods and LSD« is a real masterpiece of the film, which is balancing on the edges of documentary genre and that I would definitely recommend it.)
Janja Sesar
Gambling, Gods and LSD
Contemplation of Film and the Viewer
It seems like there is one passion connecting and unifying all people on the world: the search for the divine, happiness and transcendence of brute reality. This forms the main guideline that connects the cinematic collage from places as diverse as Las Vegas and India that Peter Mettler shot on his long voyage. A picture that combines so different footage as religious gatherings, where people fall in trance, explosions of buildings and interviews of drug addicts is hold together exactly by this “central human occupation”. In the personal “confessions” of the people while facing the camera, one can clearly discover Metller’s sensitive approach to this intimate theme, who was seemingly deeply engaged with what he was doing. While being in a way a documentary film it is significant what stress the director gave on searching visually expressive and experimental visual forms rather than talk and the well chosen and masterly mixed music that in some parts gives you the impression of watching a video art or VJ screening. It is through this that the audience is grasped in the cinematic reality, which, one could say, becomes the reality itself, since it deeply concerns all of us. So for instance the stress on universal unity that is communicated through all the rituals and also scientific talks, grasps the “external” viewer himself, who comes in touch with the movie and the audience in the cinema itself.
Martin Marzidovšek
The Wild Blue Yonder
The thing I found most amusing and fascinating about The Wild Blue Yonder is the fact that it uses real footage and documentary style to build up a bizarre fantasy world. The film is a collage of NASA’s recordings, old black-and-white shots depicting historical events and impressions of the underwater world, tied up together only by a first person narrator – a human-like alien who is telling us a story about how he came to Earth and how humans are now (stupidly) trying to colonize his deserted home planet Andromeda. His story, spoken furiously directly at us or through a voice-over narration makes a new, coherent whole from all the documentary footage and gives it a whole new meaning. He even backs it up by interviews with (supposedly real-life) scientists arguing a bunch of crazy space theories. Herzog is subverting reality to create a new one and seems like he is trying to show us how the truth is always in the eyes of the beholder.
Špela Barlič
Gambling, Gods and LSD
What to say to a film that is not actually telling us some special story which tries to be an allegory of something or a piece of art but is confronting us immediately with life and the joy of being alive just as it is? Because this is how Peter Mettler made a movie out of nothing but life and in order to let us being part he creates an atmosphere firstly in his work but secondly also between work and audience where there is nothing in between: because of him filming and interviewing different people at four different places all over the world in a honest and most intimate way, he seems to make visible what really is affecting and motivating us: finding a way to other people, to nature, to yourself and even to god but not only finding the way but also then seeing yourself as being part of them and as becoming one altogether.
It took the director four years to finish his work and as movie it lasts for three hours but nevertheless without pointing out especially what was mentioned before he makes us feel all this by using a variety of impressions of nature, human beings and life and because of this the movie becomes a little piece of art. Just as life is itself.
Susanne Pedarnig
