Scissere

A first-person foray into the disorienting realm between reason and sensation, Peter Mettler's SCISSERE is an incorrigibly inventive first feature film. It deploys a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of optical effects, in rendering the experiences of a mental patient wandering outside institutional confines for the first time in many years. Wide-eyed and frightened, the central figure (named Bruno Scissere), imagines himself inside the sensibilities of three people he randomly spots at a bus station – a young mother, a heroin addict and an entymologist. Elusive, allusive and aesthetically rich, it summons images from sources as diverse as Andrei Tarkovsky and Michael Snow. SCISSERE is a film which deliberately eludes verbal categorization or description – and with good reason: the only logic heeded by a film about the surrender to pure intuition is the logic of sensation. In this case, reason's sleep has not bred monsters but inexpressible beauty.

«SCISSERE is a film that many resent– it demands as much as it is willing to give. And what it is willing to give is nothing less than a heightened awareness of all that we can see and hear in the world around us; a heightened awareness of ourselves, or others, and of how we cope or fail to cope in a world of increasing complexitiy and alienation.»
Laurinda Hartt, Cinema (Canada)