An extraordinary, luminous book made in creative collaboration with one of the most important filmmakers working today. Peter Mettler has created an essential body of work, exploring the intractable ingredients of cinema itself. His total physical output consists of some 24 hours of film. Through these deep and far-reaching conversations with José Teodoro, this single day is expanded into months, years, and several decades. Perhaps through to the end of time itself. A unique cinematic/literary achievement, combining the two forms with a fascinatingly harnessed alchemy.”
— Atom Egoyan, Academy Award-nominated director of The Sweet Hereafter
“Peter Mettler is an unconventional filmmaker who patrols the interstices between genres; he’s prone to sudden detours, stolen glances, and leaps of faith. You never know which way he’s going to go next. José Teodoro’s fine new book Nothing But Time takes its subject’s multidirectional restlessness in stride and keeps pace with his peregrinations — you feel the thrill of the chase. The book reads like a track meet between swift thinkers. It’s fun and invigorating to keep up.”
— Adam Nayman, film critic and author of Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks and The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together
In the cosmology of Canadian cinema, Peter Mettler is our seeker. From his nonfiction adventure film Picture of Light, in which a small crew travels north to capture the aurora borealis, to his sprawling, Genie Award-winning travelogue/essay film Gambling, Gods and LSD, Mettler has maintained a constant forge into the terra incognita of the transcendental. With the release of the auteur’s most ambitious film, While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts, there has never been a better time to discover Mettler’s singular body of work.
The product of eleven years of conversations with playwright and author José Teodoro, Nothing But Time explores this extraordinary artist’s life and practice, which brims with tales of uncanny coincidence, collaborations with fellow artists such as Atom Egoyan, Robert Lepage, Fred Frith, Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, and Jim O’Rourke, and encounters with visionaries from the worlds of science and spirituality. In Mettler’s story, the yearning for knowledge is balanced with the surrender to boundless mystery and an uncommon commitment to cultivating our collective sense of wonder.