Aura, auroraand aurality: The narrative of place in picture of light

Abstract

Peter Mettler's Picture of Light (1994) is a self-reflexive study of media, knowledge and nature - how we understand and come to know the world through film and photography. My analysis draws on haptic theory, sound studies and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus to look at the permeable boundaries between the subject and audience, image and sound, and immersion and reflexivity. In this paper I use different interpretations of scripts and improvisation to look at how narrative, technique and technology can all be traced to the placement of the body in space and time and how these themes are used in the film to create an experience that, somewhat in opposition to what appears as the narrator's emphasis on distancing, creates an aura of the attempt to represent the Aurora Borealis on film.