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Fiction is fake, and documentaries are the truth, right?
So what better venue than a documentary about the power of belief to pull the trusting viewer's leg?
The film is Mana: Beyond Belief, an absurdist world tour from directors Peter Friedman and Roger Manley that examines how people treat sacred or presumed-to-be transcendent things. It opens at the Varsity Friday.
Elvis impersonators mark the 25th anniversary of the King's death outside Graceland, mourners in Japan set fire to a cardboard effigy of the deceased's beloved Mercedes, the Shroud Of Turin draws a standing room crowd of Catholic celebrants, a frenzied crowd of sushi investors makes bids at a tuna auction, a North Carolina Congressman distributes American flags that have "flown" over the Capitol (for a nanosecond).
Some interviewees are fake, however, including a "salesman" of dead-celebrity body parts, and an inventor of a lightning-powered transportation device.
"The body parts are real," Friedman says, "but it's a collection that belongs to a museum, and the museum curator was pretending to be a body parts salesman." And the "inventor?" "He's an artist who makes machines out of industrial junk and tells stories. The underlying message is 'The world is what you believe it to be, so why not believe it to be something wonderful?'
"Our whole idea was we're making a film about belief, so why not use belief to make a point? In fiction, you believe everything's false, and in a documentary you believe everything's true. So we thought we should subvert the process."
Friedman doesn't shy away from devoting years to the esoteric. His most famous film, Death By Design, is about the life-cycle of cells and how we dance to their existential drumbeat.
Similarly, he and Manley (a folklorist and museum curator) spent five years running with the concept of "mana," a Polynesian idea about the energy of objects, sustained by the power of belief. "There is no word for it in the English language," he says, "and yet examples of it happen around us every day."
He mentions a fan catching a Barry Bonds record-setting home run ball and being assessed for a million dollars by the IRS. In the film, he segues from the tuna-auction to a commodities exchange, "so you go from people bidding for an object, to people bidding for things that don't even exist yet."
And lest we get caught up in the ridiculousness of other cultures, Friedman says, the filmmakers were careful to balance the absurdities. "We were looking for connections," he says. "We show a West African voodoo priest dressing up in the costume of a revered dead person to experience their mana. What does an Elvis impersonator do? He dresses in the costume of a revered dead person to experience his mana. You see a Hindu bless his computer (with online offerings to Ganesh), but what about people smashing bottles of champagne on the bow of a ship?"
I joke to Friedman that the film's insight is the kind you might get from smoking pot, but not have much enthusiasm for in the morning. He laughs and says, "I don't object to your premise. But if you're going to work on something for years, it's a good idea for it to be something you can stand to think about for years."
He also bristles a little at the notion that it must be fun flying around the world to film a philosophical concept. "People don't see that we worked for five years and got paid for five months. Or that we raised the money ourselves piecemeal and it's still not paid for, or that we paid $12,000 in excess baggage that wasn't in our budget, or that some of our money came from the States, and it lost 40% of its value while we were shooting. (Mana is a U.S./Dutch/German/Finnish co-production).
"They just say 'Oh look, they went to Japan and Burma and Africa! And that's true. But it's only part of the story."