From April 3 to 5, 2025, we were guests at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna for the second time with a selection of films. For our programme there, films from the previous festival edition were juxtaposed with older contributions from Duisburg’s festival history. Here you can read the introduction to the screening of the films by Peter Mettler and Clementine Roy.
The two films we are screening today could be, rather luridly, I admit, presented under the title: Fire and Ice or Ice and Fire. But even if it may sound catchy, that’s not the point. I am not sure if there has to be a point when showing two films, but when we discussed showing these two films together, I was reminded of the first and only time I witnessed a total eclipse. I was nine years old, it was in August 1999. I remember a couple of things from that day. Most of all I remember that I was not allowed to look in the direction everybody was looking in. It was dangerous, they said. Don’t look at the sun. There were these special sunglasses but one could see nothing through them or I didn’t understand how to handle them as a child. So what really stuck with me from that day went beyond the act of seeing. It was the moment it got colder, for example, and it was the silence of the birds when it became dark and the way they started singing again as if it were early morning in the middle of the day. It was something I could feel with my senses, feel instead of comprehend. And yet, I was left with a desire that I clearly remember even though I was very little. The desire to see more, to capture that fleeting second, to have an image of what is essentially without an image and is maybe even better off without an image. I am not sure if this desire to really see the darkened sun, the black sun relates to a desire for knowledge, for understanding. Maybe it does.
In some sense, the two films we are going to see today both in their own way fuel the desire and expectation of cinema as something that broadens the perspective, that can help us look at things. Something that captures fleetingness and beauty. In both films protagonists want to film what is there only for a few moments. A flash of lightning or the polar lights, aurora borealis. They use an advanced technique or their mobile phone. It doesn’t really matter. I just used the word capture but capture is the wrong word, I think. It’s more like these films were collecting experiences and observations in order to create a sense of the things that we sometimes can’t see. I am referring to the often talked about things in-between. Something that is there right now but we don’t have words for it. It’s something between our perception and everything we are perceiving. This is a dangerous undertaking. It could easily become quite esoteric or vague. But both filmmakers, Peter Mettler and Clementine Roy, start from something concrete, from the real, even if that term is a bit out of date. They start from things they can see. Snow, birds, hotel rooms or a tattoo shop. People they can talk to or be with. They use the camera like a basket in which they collect little gifts from encounters. Sometimes it’s just a shot, then somebody talks in front of the camera, or it’s just being in the same space with someone, calmly, and nothing has to be said. There is a question in both films, a question that perhaps relates to the ways we can think about the documentary aspects of cinema: It has to do with film being a medium of collecting experiences, gazes, desires. It has to do with understanding how the work is not always about controlling what others should see, it’s the understanding that it takes as much work to invite, in order to open up possibilities for us to see something at all.
I am sure a total eclipse would fit in those two films without changing their way of seeing. But I wonder, and I asked myself when encountering those two films: Is cinema and is cinematic time suitable for capturing “nature” and natural occurrences or phenomena? It’s a big question, but I feel it gaining in necessity relating to the world we are living in. To be honest, I don’t know the answer. I have only questions. For example: When does a filmmaker cut while filming a cloud or a mountain? Is it possible to cut at the right moment? What is the image that can follow a cloud or a field of snow? Traditionally, in cinema, movements between people, through doors or exchanged looks ask for a cut. It’s then or never. However, when filming a cloud, you need another reason to cut. In Clementine Roy’s film you will see a cut after a bird exits the frame, for example. In a sequence accompanied by something close to drone music Mettler tries to cut following the movement of light in a time-lapse sequence. Is there an
image juste of a landscape? It seems rather arbitrary, although you will see some interesting proposals in the films. The concept of deep time (the time that works in all things and goes beyond our perception of time, for example the way fossils develop and so on) exceeds cinema. Cinema can not present this time and thus cinema might feel a bit lost addressing certain modes of the crisis that humanity is facing. Some filmmakers have employed different strategies to give a sense of this deep time. Drone music is the most horrible of these means, if I may say so. How to show how landscapes change in a film? How to show the melting of ice? The dying of fish? It’s difficult, maybe even impossible. Is it really impossible? Of course, you can film how ice melts or fish die. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to film the changes over time. You can only film the symptoms. I think what I want to say here has to do with our misled understanding of images as information and evidence. We would have to rethink the way a lot of films employ images… Maybe not even rethink, maybe just look at the films of those who have proposed different strategies.
Does it always have to be something that moves in and out of the frame? Or is there another logic to editing, to collecting images? When a storm begins, Roy presents us with a couple of shots and she just cuts from one shot to the next, or so it seems. Apparently, there is no reason for the cut in the image itself. Rhythm maybe. We can ask her later. When I had a closer look at how the films work with time and so-called nature, I felt that they confronted me with an idea of how people interact with nature. They don’t just show nature, they film how people make images of the world. Maybe you will feel differently about it, but to me, whenever Mettler and Roy are filming the world, they are filming the people in dialogue with the world. So, there is an identification with the gaze but there is also distance or a reflection, something that questions the idea that you can actually film what you want to see. Their films show this: It’s difficult to see without interpreting, without mythologizing. Seeing is difficult. Seeing a film is difficult. It’s difficult to experience without wanting to keep some record of your experience.
They don’t say: Look, this is nature. Look, this is a human being. They say: Look, this is how you could look at nature or people, or this is how others look at nature and people. That’s also why mythology plays a role in both films, I think. They film nature but they also film the way we narrate or interpret nature. I wonder if there is a chance to really go back to Ovid with cinema. I don’t mean that we should show transformations, they can do that with special effects, as Mettler would say, rather displeased. I mean in the sense of seeing something which we perceive as magical and explain it through a system that is not scientific, but that is closer to poetry or light representing violence or tenderness.
I don’t necessarily want to gender the different approaches of the two films but it’s quite apparent that Mettler’s attempt in PICTURE OF LIGHT to film aurora borealis is that of a conqueror. He travels to the end of the world, he has to prepare his equipment to resist the freezing temperatures, he is a Werner Herzog kind of romantic who wants to prove that nature is still more beautiful than anything you can create with special effects. He knows this and questions himself with humor, among other things. The project was initiated and financed by the Swiss eccentric polymath Andreas Züst who dreamed of filming this light. Mettler refers to Züst in his voice-over when he declares: I met a man who loves to watch the sky. In some sense, and Michael Snow has said this about the film, it’s also a science film. It’s a scientific experiment: What can a camera see when humans can’t even breathe because of the cold? But it’s the science of a film director, so it’s science aiming for that which we can’t put into words. Clementine Roy, however, does not seem to want to prove anything. Her film is not a test. It’s the opposite of science. If her film was a book, the pages would just fall out of it. It’s not because it’s sloppily done. It’s something else. Something that reminds me of haiku or the writings of Kawabata Yasunari. I’d say it is the fleetingness I mentioned in the beginning. Two sequences are not necessarily related but, in placing them next to one another, a meaning evolves. It’s the attempt to make a film as silently as possible. Hers is a film that would almost exist without its director, even if that’s a paradox. While Mettler gives a very strong sense of a place and a journey, it all dissolves in ARANCIA BRUCIATA. While Mettler is very much present in his film, Roy is almost invisible. Her film not only tries to follow those who read signs in the sky, it arguably also wants to become such a sign. It doesn’t only follow the flight of birds, it learns from them. At least that’s how I see the film.
On the other hand, cinema, and the films of the Duisburger Filmwoche have always represented this, very often expressed the desire to find counter images. Images that do not work like the images in other media or of dominant forms of cinema. I think this is another thread connecting the films. They propose different ways of sorting out realities. They don’t follow the dramaturgy of plots or anything of the kind. Mettler, who structures his film like a travel diary, even reaches out of the realm of images to find a different way of perceiving: “Living in a time where things do not seem to exist if they are not captured as an image, but if you close your eyes, you may see the lights of your own retina. Not unlike the northern lights, not unlike the movements of thought, like a shapeless accumulation of everything we will ever see.” Both films propose an openness as a filmic strategy so that, quite literally, the light can come in. Fittingly, the festival’s motto last year was ENTFERNTES SORTIEREN, which one could translate as REMOTE COLLATING. I am not sure about the remoteness of the films, although it exists, but they do reflect on collation in relation to cinema, to images. In this regard I find it interesting that both films are in some way products of a crisis. Maybe there is something to this. As a society we may no longer turn to a god when it comes to looking for signs of hope. But we do still look toward the sky, be it to see light, the flight of birds or the sun. Next year there will be a total eclipse in Middle Europe. You can be sure we will see more than one film about it in 2027. Mettler and Roy are two of the filmmakers I would commission to make such a film if I had money and if they would do commissions.