Peter Mettler’s epic new endeavour While the Green Grass Grows is expected to run for up to 12 hours and is in seven parts. In Nyon this week, Mettler is showing parts 1 and 6. These are very intimate and personal films. They are an elegy for his parents, whose passing they chronicle. They are also philosophical affairs in which the director observes the natural world around him and reflects on everything from the Covid pandemic to the possibility of reincarnation.
Early in part 1, Mettler is heard talking about his “love-hate” relationship with filmmaking. It’s a surprising expression for him to use. The Swiss-Canadian director, who shoots his own movies and has a distinguished parallel career as a cinematographer, seems like someone born to hold a movie camera. He can find beauty and surprise wherever he points his lens.
“The love side for sure is its potential to reveal things and create experiences in the people who are watching which are not that attainable in everyday life. It [film] is definitely a medium that can enlighten you and take you places…the hate part, I think, is partly because it is so technological. The extent to which one has to work with the technology to create these experiences is almost antithetical to the experiences you are showing,” Mettler explains his ambivalent attitude toward his craft.
“They [films] are very wrapped up in technology, money, ego, presentation, all these things in order to get to a point where you are trying to share an experience you might call spiritual or enlightening.”
In parts 1 and 6, Mettler films his mother and father at the end of their lives.
“For me, it’s involuntary, almost a way of going through that process; of becoming an orphan, being an only child as well and [with] no other family. It was very much a separation from my family,” the director reflects on the loss he experienced. He talks of processing that through his filmmaking and “maybe trying to keep them alive longer through doing that…obviously, I know they’re not alive but keeping that memory, keeping that connection alive.”
Mettler acknowledges that it took “a long time” before he could bring himself to look at the footage he shot in the hospital where his father Freddy was dying. He told his editor Jordan Kawai that he couldn’t “deal with this material” and was relying on him to “take certain choices” about how it should be assembled. “He [Kawai] did the first steps so it became a manageable thing for me…and then it was a combination, partially the craft of editing and filmmaking combined with the process of mourning and letting go – and loving who my father was.”
In his work, Mettler continually challenges himself formally. He is always looking to “play outside his tropes” and to avoid repeating himself. In While The Green Grass Grows, he is working without a script, in an “improvised, exploratory way.” The subject matter wasn’t even pre-determined. “I just had to start making the film,” he says of how he leapt off with the project. “Whatever would happen was going to be what the film was about.”
Part of what did happen was the pandemic.” It was definitely an interesting time,” the director says of the Covid period and the lockdowns that came with it. “It provoked a lot of interesting thinking in a lot of people – and an awareness, a very profound awareness, of the cycles of nature which you see in the film,” he says of how the film reflects on death, renewal and reincarnation.
There is also a hint of Brecht or Jean-Luc Godard in the self-reflexive scenes in which Mettler sits in an attic with the stack of bank notes, the inherited money with which he is going to pay for the film we are watching. “I think the money is quite incredible from a graphic design point of view,” he explains why he pays such attention to the aesthetic quality of the multi-coloured bank notes as well as to their transactional value. The different notes have different themes. One even shows the famous outdoor screen in the Piazza Grande in Locarno.
Mettler was born in Canada but his parents were Swiss. “All my life, I have been between the two places,” he says. “They [the parents] were quite patriotic. Switzerland was a big part of their lives even when they were in Toronto.” He himself feels “more comfortable” working in Switzerland than in Canada and believes that he is better appreciated there. He can’t put his finger on the reason why, but talks of the “deeper” culture in Switzerland. “There are more institutions, more funding, more museums…through the generations, there is just a greater awareness of the depth of art.”
Music played an important part in the director’s emergence as a filmmaker. “The piano got me into filmmaking,” he points out. “One of the great things my parents did was force me to take piano lessons against my will. I was forced to learn some basic classical piano playing but I always loved to improvise. Finally when they said you don’t have to take the lessons any more, I continued to play on my own through improvisation. The improvisation was usually accompanied by some imagining or visualisation, kind of like a story but not really,” Mettler remembers.
This turned out to be ideal preparation for when, later in high school, he joined the film club and started making his first movies on Super 8mm. “I saw film as a great medium to explore all kinds of things in life. You can basically take it with you on any kind of journey. It was clear to me that was what I wanted to pursue,” Mettler explains how his cinephilia began.
What is in store in other chapters of While the Green Grass Grows? One section, part 5, takes Mettler to Cuba where he spent time at the renowned Cuban film school, EICTV. He was there as part of an initiative hatched by Jean Perret, the former head of Visions Du Réel, who takes directors to the school for three week stints.
“You arrive there and there is a picture of [former Cuban leader Fidel] Castro in the entrance way, and [writer Gabriel] Garcia Marquez, the writer, and [filmmaker Fernando] Birri…it’s complicated. I think the spirit of the school is really interesting. It’s mostly Latin American and South American students but there are people from everywhere. I think the beauty of it is that it’s outside of Havana so it is in the countryside. There’s a real sense of community, of people living through stuff together and getting down and dirty making films. At the same time, the machinations all over Cuba, you really have the feeling that it’s barely holding together. There is definitely problems with money, bureaucracy and supplies…and yet the spirit is quite fantastic.”
Another part of the Green Grass series focuses on Mettler’s friend, Jeremy Narby, a Canadian anthropologist with an expert knowledge of “intelligence in nature.” He is depicted floating down a river in a canoe in Manitoba, having a conversation with Mettler about humans’ relationship to plant life.
The director isn’t quite sure how he would like the completed While The Green Grass Grows cycle to be seen. “I am still not sure of the final length. It could be 10 or 11 hours. I think the ideal way would be to see the parts in order over a couple days…you can watch it all at once but that’s a challenge just to sit that long!”
