Peter Mettler’s Eye in the Sky

This article was first published in the Fall 2009 issue of Green Living magazine.

Few Canadians have actually seen the controversial England-sized chunk of land known as the Alberta tar sands; due to private property restrictions, cameras rarely get within shooting distance. So, acclaimed Toronto filmmaker Peter Mettler (Gambling, Gods and LSD) and a Greenpeace camera team took to the air, filming from a helicopter 300 metres above. Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands the 43-minute, largely wordless result, provides meditative, haunting images that help us determine the tar sands’ worth for ourselves. Here, Mettler describes his ambitions for the film.

“My work is about how we see, how we understand the world, about consciousness and perception. I saw an opportunity to show the tar sands to the public—people know a lot about the tar sands, but not exactly what they look like. Aerial is the only way to look at them; you can’t get anywhere near them on the ground.

“The law is that air space is private up to 300 metres. Beyond that it’s public space. We had to get really sophisticated camera equipment to be able to zoom in close enough. One of the things that’s important with the film is to understand relationships. You see the forest, you see a house—and then you see the size of the tailings pond beside the mine. I was trying to get a visual linkage, which is why the shots are quite long. For example, the opening shot is a man walking on some yellow stuff, which is sulphur, a by-product of the tar sands process. As the shot pulls out, you can see how much of it there is, how huge the pile is. It almost looks like a Mayan pyramid. By the time it’s a full frame shot, you can’t see the tiny human anymore.

“I felt that the object of the film was to do something that works in a realm of pure observation. Information and factoids about the tar sands are readily available. This became a kind of construction of image and sound, like a piece of music that takes you on this journey of observation. I don’t usually state things in a propagandist or an agitprop sense. I tried to show something that would provoke thinking, as opposed to taking a stance and demanding something, which is more traditionally what Greenpeace would do. Greenpeace wanted to embrace the way a filmmaker works, have more of a vision and potentially reach a different audience. Hopefully, that will happen.”

Petropolis is showing at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 16 and 19.