Mana: You Won't Believe What Some People Believe

BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Peter Friedman

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Peter Friedman has been making documentaries since 1984. He has received the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, the Prix Italia and the Prix Europa. He has been nominated for an Emmy and an Academy Award. Friedman's new documentary Mana—Beyond Belief, co-directed by Roger Manley, is a symphony of tightly controlled HD images which convey various manifestations of belief throughout the world. In an era of self-consciously amateurish documentary making, this formal, globetrotting essay contains images so elegant and that it sometimes seems decadent by contrast. Mana—Beyond Belief is available on DVD through the movie's official Web site as well as through Netflix.

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BRAINTRUSTdv: You and Roger Manley have very different backgrounds. How did you come together to work on this project?

Peter Friedman: Roger's an anthropologist, folklorist, photographer and curator. I'm a filmmaker. It was a very close collaboration directorially between two people with complementary skills. To oversimplify: Roger's knowledge provided most of the raw material. It was mostly up to me to translate it into film language.


BTdv: Can you explain the Polynesian concept of mana?

PF: If you are drinking from a paper cup, and someone tells you that that cup used to belong to Elvis Presley, you probably won't throw it away. That's because the cup suddenly has mana.

Religious objects, objects which are physical traces of history, personal souvenirs, and celebrities and their possessions, and many other things—and people—all have a kind of aura or special importance. The manifestations vary tremendously, but the phenomenon is universal, which is the point of the film.


BTdv: Whose idea was it to investigate mana specifically?

PF: Initially, Roger wanted to make a documentary about mana objects, and I wanted make an essay about belief as the essential building block of the mind. The result is Mana—Beyond Belief.


BTdv: Early in the movie, a venerable-looking Maori carefully explains mana, which leads one to expect the rest of the movie to be pedagogical—like something shown in a religious studies course. But then the camera silently observes various cultures' embodiments of mana. There is such a high degree of aloofness, in fact, that it begins to feel like Herzog's Fata Morgana, which the director has described as the work of an alien race scrutinizing the people of Earth. Why the explicit definition of mana followed by opaque and elusive exemplifications?

PF: It would have been too much to ask of the audience to make connections between such diverse and apparently unrelated scenes entirely on their own. We opted to orient them with a few minutes of straightforward exposition, then move into more purely visual storytelling. What you call "opaque and elusive" we call experiential.


BTdv: Increasingly, the episodes (for lack of a better word) are clarified by experts and proponents through interviews and testimonials. The lowrider enthusiast in New Mexico explains his obsession with monotonous earnestness; the delusional collector of celebrities' body parts rambles on like a subject in an early Errol Morris film. In a way these sequences are robbed of their inherent magic by being too talky. The faux-Rembrandt notwithstanding, the episodes with accompanying explication are the least compelling. Why are some episodes interpreted for the viewer and others left to speak for themselves?

PF: You characterized the scenes without explanation as "opaque and elusive."


BTdv: I think the opacity and elusiveness are what makes them compelling.

PF: I would have liked to have used no dialogue whatsoever, but some scenes that we really needed couldn't have worked without interviews. Non-religious people tend to like the interview scenes best because they're the most familiar and the funniest. The lowriders scene could have—and probably should have—been constructed without dialogue. The body parts dealer is not delusional—he is fictional. The others are storytellers. Except for the Rembrandt scene there are no experts in the film at all. Are you sure your cat didn't step on your remote control and switch it to PBS?


BTdv: The body parts dealer is fictional? Am I to understand that you made up a character for the film? Why on earth...? There are plenty of scenes that generate laughter, so I can't imagine you did it just to be amusing. You're blurring the line between traditional non-interventionist investigation, which is how the movie bills itself, and mockumentary.

PF: All film depends on belief, aka suspension of disbelief. In fiction films, one assumes everything is false, which is never entirely true. In documentary films, one assumes everything is true, which never entirely true either. Mana is a film about belief, so we subverted the covention in order to offer people a rare moment of awareness of their own process of belief. Everyone reads that scene differently: some people see it's fiction immediately; others stop believing it as it unfolds; others believe it completely; and others, like you, don't believe his story but do believe the documentary filmmaker, so you decide to believe it's a factual portrait a delusional person. In fact, he is a real collector (and he's also the real curator of the real Dime Museum in Baltimore) showing his real collection, which is not for sale. At the museum he intentionally makes no distinction between the body parts which are real—and some are—and those which are fake, thereby raising the issue of belief. What he says on camera about their history is entirely fiction—or mostly.


BTdv: Are there any cues in the movie that indicate this scene is a hoax?

PF: The author and the actor are acknowledged in the end credits.


BTdv: To get back to the "opaque and elusive" remark, the most poignant sequences in Mana are the ones in which exotic behavior goes unexplained. We watch voyeuristically; the camera lingers a little too long; we grow restless and uncomfortable. But finally, somehow, I related to the rituals, understanding them in some inarticulate way—primally. I felt this particularly during the Benin ritual in which a costumed villager chases others through dusty streets. When you were present for such things, did you feel their weight, their cultural and personal significance?

PF: The weight and significance you refer to is mana, which is made visible by behavior. I can't speak for Roger on this, but I respond less to the objects themselves than to the emotional state of those present.

I disagree that the film is voyeuristic because we implicate the viewers, at least through context, because every viewer has his or her own mana objects. Several people have said it took two or three days after seeing the film for that to really sink in. Or that they went home afterwards and looked at all the objects in their homes a little differently. Americans and Europeans don't have a word for mana, which is one reason we aren't usually aware of it.


BTdv: Were you particularly moved by anything you witnessed?

PF: We were moved by everything we witnessed, or it wouldn't be in the film.


BTdv: Maybe "moved" is the wrong word. Were you moved by Elvis impersonators? The lowrider aficionado? Your own fictional creation, the body parts dealer? What I'm asking—the appropriate phraseology eludes me—is whether you responded spiritually to anything you witnessed. Did the conviction of any particular believers featured in Mana impact you deeply enough to make you feel an affinity with them more than others? I suppose I'm asking you to step out of the role of director, in as much as I'm asking you to play favorites.

PF: In fact, I was moved by the Elvi ("Elvi" is the plural of Elvis, as I learned in Memphis). These people are escaping their ordinary lives to be King for a day, but they are completely lucid about it. They are having a fantastic time, all while paying homage to someone they revere. This is strikingly similar to the impoverished Burmese peasants picnicking on marble pavilions beneath the golden pagodas of their Buddhist temple complexes. The lowrider afficionados also lift themselves out of modest circumstances by investing their creativity, craftsmanship and identity in their unique cars. I'm not interested in
			"Elvis"

cars per se, but I was definitely moved by these people because they are as committed to mastery as any artist or scientist is. All these people are moving because they are all moved. To play favorites, though: Dr. Evermor affected me the most, because this man, posing as an eccentric telling preposterous tales about his mountain of rusting industrial junk, is quite intentionally—though never explicitly—challenging us not just to see belief, which is difficult enough, but to master it. To see beyond belief.


BTdv: Some of the rituals examined in Mana are elements of religious ceremony, while others are just hobbies—thus, some are sacred and some are secular or profane. Some of the objects are man-made, while others are naturally occurring. What made you look at mana so broadly?

PF: Diversity masks universality. Context unmasks it. That's why it had to be so broad.


BTdv: Wasn't the scope a little daunting?

PF: Daunting? Yes, but mainly because making a broad, thematic film like this carries a high risk of ending up with a slick, superficial travelogue garnished with a bit of trite ideology. We think we avoided this trap.


BTdv: Describing Mana as a travelogue would be about as pejorative or dismissive as one could get. Of course, labels and categories are reductive by nature. Some have called Mana an essay, but its overall lack of explication and geographical specifics leave it feeling more like a poem or tableau vivant. San Francisco Doc Fest described the movie as "experimental" while the Village Voice called it "intriguingly deadpan." The ambiguity of the work naturally leads to disparate interpretations. If you had to categorize it, what would you call it?

PF: We think of it as a visual essay. The problem is one of nomenclature and not of filmmaking, though it impacts distribution because many gatekeepers are afraid of films that don't resemble anything they've seen before.

Our aspiration was to make a rich and entertaining work of art which invites contemplation and suggests the world is all one place. It's up to the viewers to judge the success of it. The diversity of responses fine with us, though we much prefer the comparisons to Mondo Kane and Rivers and Tides than to Baraka and Errol Morris.


BTdv: Do you feel that anyone has grossly misinterpreted the movie?

PF: No one grossly misinterpreted it, though it is very difficult addressing both religious and non-religious viewers at the same time. They are like different species.


BTdv: Mana begins with sun moving slowly behind clouds, and we watch the light change on a highway. Variety referred to this sort of thing as "showmanship." Your movie is tranquil and glossy, whereas most of the current vogue of documentaries are frenetic and unpolished. What inspired the visual fastidiousness of Mana?

PF: There are always some private reasons at work, and it doesn't matter whether or not the audience consciously perceives these. I suppose in some way we were reacting against the lack of mastery of visual language—and even of basic craftsmanship—in so many documentaries, including the box office hits. Narration is often like a wall separating the viewers from the subject. It under-uses the potential of film to create the kind of direct experience that art creates.


BTdv: The Shroud of Turin is rarely on display to the public. How did you manage to get access to shoot it?

PF: We always went to meet the people involved well in advance of the shoot. We were given unprecedented access to the Shroud and many other generally inaccessible things, I guess because people felt they could trust our intentions. We tried to honor their trust.


BTdv: What would you say were the most serendipitous shoots on this project?

PF: We filmed a Chinese funeral in Malaysia, at which there was a full-sized white Mercedes made of paper. The taxi we arrived in also happened to be a white Mercedes. The family took that as a good omen. They wrote down our license plate number, used it on a lottery ticket the next day, and won.

Another was finding a software engineer who practices religious Hindu rituals to bless his computer, who happened to be the next door neighbor of the person we really went to India to film (and who got cut out).

Then there were two cliffhangers which ended happily but in the nick of time: after months of stonewalling, the Burmese government mysteriously granted us visas less than eighteen hours before our flight. And, after arranging a complicated shoot in Japan (from Paris) the worst heat wave in fifty years suddenly accelerated the fleeting peak of the cherry blossoms, yet we somehow made it there on the best possible day.

Hard not to become a believer, after all that.


BTdv: Other than the deleted Indian segment, did you shoot any cultural expressions of mana that you decided to leave out of the final cut?

PF: Many. Mana—Beyond Belief is ninety-two minutes long, but the first cut was five hours. We had to balance sacred and secular, funny and serious, traditional and new, Eastern and Western, and several other elements. So most of what got cut was in search of this balance, though some scenes didn't work as well as we'd hoped and others we had to cut so the overall length would feel right.


BTdv: You've urged audiences not to take it the movie seriously. What's the risk in taking it seriously? Or do you just feel that people are generally too credulous?

PF: We want people to know they can just relax and enjoy the film, even if it is challenging subject matter and a form they're not accustomed to. The film also has very funny scenes, but they start almost halfway through. We probably should have signaled in the opening. We did signal it at one point during rough editing, but that part got cut out for unrelated reasons.


BTdv: The final scene involving the time machine is so whimsical that it feels dissonant. Why did you want to end by "participating" in someone's mana, after having carefully maintained a critical distance throughout the movie? It's a delightful scene, but it's odd that you're suddenly winking at the audience.

PF: The film is full of subtler winks, but the Forevertron is at the end because it's the world's largest and strangest monument to belief. Dr. Evermor is the one who has really figured it all out. His message, unexplained of course, is that the world is whatever you believe it to be, so why not choose your beliefs consciously, to generate shared happiness? That's more profound than I'm making it sound in this interview, but it works that way in the film.


BTdv: Since I didn't realize you'd inserted a fictional character into the movie, I probably missed your "subtler winks."

PF: Mostly the winks have to do with authenticity, and mostly they weren't meant to call much attention to themselves.


BTdv: What are some of them?

PF: At the African voodoo ceremony, a spectator is wearing a torn T-shirt which says, "Coke is it." Lots going on there I won't go into, but its inclusion was not accidental.

In the cathedral in Italy, the priest says, "The image on the Shroud reminds us of the suffering of Jesus," tacitly acknowledging that the Shroud might be fake and implying that that doesn't matter because it can still provoke real feelings.

The Rembrandt-in-the-nuclear-reactor scene was faked. That is to say, it was re-enacted, because the actual research at the reactor was done in the 1980s. We used the real scientists carrying a reproduction of the painting, and adapted their whole process for the camera. Since the real painting turned out to be a fake Rembrandt anyway, the reproduction we used is really a fake-fake Rembrandt. The real-fake Rembrandt is still hanging in the museum because it is a real painting from Rembrandt's time, even though it's not a real Rembrandt. The reproduction we filmed was painted by the museum at a time when they what they thought was the real Rembrandt was in imminent danger. They temporarily hung the reproduction in its place without telling anyone, and of course no one noticed. So the museum goers at that time thought they were seeing a real Rembrandt, the museum directors thought they were exhibiting a fake-real Rembrandt, but later learned it was a fake-fake Rembrandt. So for our cameras, real researchers were faking the x-raying of a real Rembrandt, using a fake-fake Rembrandt as a prop to fake real experiments which they really did do and which proved that the real-real Rembrandt was a fake-real Rembrandt. As a footnote: we couldn't find an archival image of "Rembrandt" so Roger made that in Photoshop. This should make it easier to understand why we added a fictional scene to the film.

Finally, the Forevertron is a pile of junk—though a magnificent and profound one. It doesn't move, there's no electricity, and the tale Dr. Evermor tells about its inventor—which is himself, even though he tells it in the third person—is completely false. But it's the kind of falsehood which reveals deeper truths than any of the true stories.


BTdv: You shot the movie on HD but screened on 35mm. Why did you use HD in the first place, and why did you decide to convert for exhibition?

PF: We shot on HD because of the extraordinary presence it gives to our extraordinary objects. It really feels like you're there, which was just what we were after. Plus we needed to shoot a lot, and HD has the advantage of using digital tape which is relatively cheap. We had no desire whatsoever to transfer to 35mm, but good HD projection is unfortunately still rare because it's so expensive.


BTdv: It took four years to complete the project. Were you using the same technology from start to finish?

PF: Yes, top-end HD-Cam, Sony CineAlta HDW-F900, the same camera used for Star Wars. We started when this format was still very new and almost no one was using it, so we were able to get a crucial in-kind investment from an HD company. That would not have been possible a year later because the demand for the equipment was much greater.


BTdv: You managed to get a national theatrical release in Canada but not in the U.S. Has the screening pedigree been what you'd hoped?

PF: Of course we would have liked a wider release, but the risk-averse nature of the U.S. film industry is something we're intimately familiar with, so there was no surprise there. We didn't want the creative work to be polluted by marketing formulas, but that comes at a heavy price.

Still, Mana has been released theatrically in Canada and Holland and will be soon in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and on TV in seven countries so far, and on DVD in the U.S. by Netflix, and many festivals worldwide.


BTdv: Mana seems at ease with itself. It's not "important" or "topical" or "timely." Do you think the deck is stacked against such documentaries?

PF: "Important" too often translates as self-important, "topical" as superficial, and "timely" as perishable. There are huge numbers of documentaries now, most of which are not very good. High-quality anything is always in a small minority, but when so many mediocre films make a big splash thanks only to their trendy subject or flashy style, it's the cultural equivalent of air pollution. Fortunately I have seen a number of first-rate documentaries on the festival circuit this year: Ears Open, Eyeballs Click by Canaan Brumley, Stolen by Rebecca Dreyfus, and Pucker Up by Kate Davis, to name a few. They're much better than the ones I've seen in theaters, but none got a U.S. theatrical release.


BTdv: If nothing else, the ushering in of the no-budget documentary has changed the way non-fiction movies are financed—it's no longer simply a matter of having the approval of tight-fisted cultural agencies. Do you think DV (from consumer formats to HD) is changing documentary for the better? What do you see as the ultimate long-term goal for digital video technology in terms of production, distribution, exhibition and public reception?

PF: DV makes documentary-making widely accessible. This vast new potential will never be fully realized artistically because few people will master the many skills required. Public reception is a challenge because viewing habits are entrenched. But as I see it, the ultimate long-term goal it is to eliminate corporate control over film production, distribution, and exhibition so we can use the technological revolution to facilitate a political revolution.