A ‘living cinema’ event, an exhibit of lightboxes glowing on black walls, a sequential photo display and a book launch featuring video projections highlight the TIFF2006 Canadian Retrospective on the multifaceted Peter Mettler.

Nine films – curated by University of Alberta film professor Jerry White – will screen, including Tectonic Plates (1992), an adaptation of a Robert Lepage play starring Lepage himself, and the aurora borealis doc extravaganza Picture of Light (1994). But much of the buzz will center on Mettler’s outside ‘happenings.’

White, who has never met Mettler, will conduct a public interview with his filmmaking subject on Sept. 5 at the Gladstone Hotel to celebrate White’s book Of This Place and Elsewhere: The Films and Photography of Peter Mettler, published by the TIFF Group.

Praised by TIFFG director and CEO Piers Handling for ‘the innovation and audacity of his work,’ Mettler has trod his own path over the past 25 years, working in documentaries, experimental film and dramas, as both a director and cinematographer.

White, who approached TIFF with the idea of a Mettler retrospective last year, first became interested in the director when he saw Picture of Light and Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002), which he says are ‘as engaged as any documentary, but use a sophisticated visual sensibility.’

Mettler’s reputation as a key figure in Toronto’s 1980s New Wave is largely based on his work as director of photography for Atom Egoyan (Next of Kin, Family Viewing) and others, and he also lensed Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal’s doc about photographer Edward Burtynsky, which screens at TIFF2006 in a Special Presentation. (All the films in the retrospective are ones that Mettler directed.)

Manufactured Landscapes is as personal a project for Mettler as it is for Baichwal.

‘Ed and I went to school together. I’ve seen his process develop,’ says Mettler.

For Mettler, shooting Manufactured Landscapes helped clarify the differences between still photography and film.

‘Ed is trying to get one or two shots that are iconographic images,’ he begins. ‘Everything leads him to find the right vantage point, the right lighting, the right moment. In the end, what you get is one shot. In film, you have to get many more shots, and you have to construct a story around the one shot that you’re exploring. We would need many more days than Ed. He slowed down on our behalf.’

As part of the festivities, Mettler is organizing two photo shows with Steve Gravestock, TIFF’s associate director of Canadian programming.

The Greener Pastures Contemporary Art gallery will host an exhibition of Mettler’s ‘Teledivinitry’ boxes – lightboxes featuring found footage from the opening sequence of Gambling, Gods and LSD, reprocessed in Photoshop. According to Mettler, the images have started to ‘disintegrate and become like paintings. They’ve lost their high-gloss TV look and become pastel-like.’

Meanwhile, Mettler is assembling a retrospective of his photography work at the nearby Lennox Contemporary gallery. Paralleling his cinema career, the images will be ‘paired and sequenced, in an associative way,’ he says, following the logic of movies.

White says he likes Mettler’s assessment of Dr. Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD – that he is ‘someone who got into chemistry for philosophical reasons… Mettler got into filmmaking for the same reasons.’ It’s that impulse, ‘using media to connect to the present,’ as Mettler would have it, that will propel Elsewhere, a ‘living cinema’ event at the Berkley Church on Sept. 15, ending the retrospective.

‘Living cinema events,’ says Mettler, ‘are a logical extension of Gambling, Gods and LSD. I want to create a viewing environment that is completely spontaneous. There should be a freedom in what is shown and how musicians react to images.’

According to Gravestock, with three projectors in use, along with digital graphics, found and Mettler-shot footage, accompanied by Gamelan (an Indonesian orchestra style), electronic and free improvised music, Elsewhere should be ‘groundbreaking.’