In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
Swiss-Canadian cinematographer Peter Mettler took his camera on his world travels, recording scenes and interviews across the world from Toronto to Nevada and Switzerland to India for his 2002 documentary Gambling, Gods and LSD. The final product is a meditative, intricate, beautifully cut together three-hour ode to interconnectedness and the fundamental truths of human existence that greatly rewards careful attention.
Mettler’s title alludes to three key channels that people around the world use to find meaning in and give structure to their lives – religious devotion, worshipping the god of chance, and the search for spirituality and meaning in hedonism and recreational chemicals. These three ideas form a loose structure for the film, but that’s as close as it gets to narrative.
Despite its free-flowing form, though, Gambling, Gods and LSD is incredibly immersive – the longer you watch, the more absorbed you become by the steady pace and the way the shots and scenes flow seamlessly from one to the next: from a waterfall to a foam party; from a miniature city to a real house. The sheer number of images and scenes overwhelm - tourist-y holiday footage of natural beauty and monuments interlace with documentary news footage of a man-hunt for a killer in a remote American desert town; the poetically-captured implosion of a grand Las Vegas hotel; the frenzied, delirious religious ecstasy of a conference of happy-clapping evangelical Christians. Mettler’s superb cinematography is a constant, finding the beauty in everything from the sublime to the mundane.
It’s also a disorienting experience – images overlap with the ever-shifting soundtrack and disembodied voices of interviewees, who reveal a fascinating portion of their stories before we first see their face, allowing us to make our assumptions before seeing them physically. The man whose wife died of cancer and whose bones he keeps in a scarf, the aging musician struggling with a heroin habit, the woman who truly believes she has reached enlightenment and can communicate with god; their stories all feed into Mettler’s overarching story about the human condition.
Despite being released in 2002, there’s something distinctly millennial about Gambling, Gods and LSD, from the concepts of existence being explored to the inference of drama with the sound of a dial-up modem making its distressed connection call.
Surreal tableaus meld with reality to give the entire film the feeling of a particularly philosophical dream – and just like a dream, the more deeply you examine it, the more there is to find. Whether you take away any meaning or simply enjoy it as an aesthetic experience is up to you.
- Nick Jarvis
“A fascinating travelogue that links ephemeral images, people's notions of consciousness and eerie landscapes to suggest that all life on this planet is somehow connected.” Vue Weekly
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.