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| Aug. 5, 2005. 01:00 AM |  |
The spiritual side of obsession
Film explores power of objects
No narrations or explanations
PETER HOWELL
MOVIE CRITIC
To most people, the Stanley Cup is a famous hockey trophy. To filmmaker Peter Friedman, it's mana.It's a Polynesian word meaning the power of objects, and it's the subject of Mana: Beyond Belief, a film Friedman co-directed with his friend Roger Manley, a photographer and art scholar."It's a concept that's very simple, but not simple to explain," says the 46-year-old Friedman, an American who lives in Paris."But people can understand mana
intuitively and immediately when you give an example like the Stanley
Cup. If I go to a department store and buy a silver cup the same weight
and size and silver content and put it next to the Stanley Cup, people
won't value it as highly as the Cup itself. Everybody knows the Stanley
Cup has importance and historical associations connected with it." Mana: Beyond Belief is
a dreamlike meditation about the power of objects, presented without
narration or obvious links between images. Friedman and Manley
travelled five continents in search of examples of mana, studying everything from the Shroud of Turin to Japanese cherry trees to Elvis Presley impersonators.
The movie opens at the Varsity Cinema today following its local
premiere last week at a benefit screening that Friedman attended. He
spoke with the Star about his film and about the power of mana.Q. Who had the idea for this, you or Roger Manley?A. "It was actually a merger of two ideas. I wanted to make a film called Beyond Belief, and he wanted to make a film called Mana.
My film was about belief, and not just religious belief, but about
belief as a building block for the mind. And he wanted to make a film
about objects and people's relationships to objects — important
objects."Q. Why were you both so interested in this? We live in a world where belief is either totally fanatical or not there at all.A. "I
think we all make our way through the world as a sort of web of
beliefs, whether we know it or not. We're sort of like Spider-Man. I'm
interested in things that are really basic to how we exist or how we
think and that also are universal. There are some things that people
everywhere have in common."Q. What do we all have in common?A. "Well, mana
is a word that is in common usage throughout Polynesia. Everywhere from
Hawaii to New Zealand it's a very common word. We don't have a word for
it in English or French, but mana is something that is very
much part of our daily lives, in the way we respond to things and the
way people place hierarchies on them, by giving them importance or by
responding to them as if they are important. It could be an ordinary
object, but it becomes important because of its history."Q. Why are objects important to us? And why does it matter to us that they be real and not imitations?A. "Our
soul, our spirituality and whatever personal vision of God we have is
very meaningful to us, and yet we can't see it and touch it. So we use
objects as a way that our ordinary five senses can provide a gateway
into that. If I can see it and touch it, it's the closest I can get to
making tangible the intangible."And it doesn't always matter if
the thing is real or not. We filmed the Shroud of Turin, which is
believed to be the grave cloth of Jesus because it has his image on it.
Various scientific analyses have strongly suggested that it's not
nearly old enough to be real, but the Roman Catholic Church still
exhibits it, telling people that it `reminds us of the suffering of
Jesus.' What this means is it can provoke a spiritual experience that
is sanctified by centuries of belief, to the point that the
authenticity is almost irrelevant."Q. You've said that you're not absolutely sure the Mona Lisa on display in the Louvre in Paris is the real Mona Lisa. It could be a copy meant to foil thieves. Do you really think that?A. "I
think in many cases it doesn't matter. I know for a fact that a famous
painting, which I can't name because my sources are confidential, was
removed for a time from a museum and replaced with a fake version."It
was during a time when there had been a rash of attacks against
artwork. And one of the most famous paintings in a country I can't name
was removed and replaced with a fake for a while, because they'd
received specific threats against it. ... I don't think it really
mattered to how people viewed the painting."Q. If belief is so important to us, why do so many people say they don't believe in God?A. "It
depends how you define `God.' I think a lot of secular people are
struggling against the notion of the old bearded man in the sky who
gives you moral dictums. But there are a lot of people like myself for
whom God is a state of mind, a sort of godlike consciousness or oneness
with the universe."Why things have gotten so polarized between
believers and non-believers, I don't know. Except there has always been
a real zeal amongst certain religions, notably Christianity and Islam,
to proselytize and to convert other people. And the way that manifests
itself now is through those religious fanatics — and I equate the
Christian ones with the Muslim ones — who are trying to get political
power. They're struggling for political power, and it really creates a
clash."Q. Why do people want to own things like Elvis Presley's guitars or John Lennon's glasses?A.
"Because they're a part of history. It's the closest you can get to
Elvis Presley or John Lennon, by having something that belonged to
them. We went to an auction of Elvis's possessions and people were
getting thousands of dollars for ashtrays and dry-cleaning receipts and
things that were utterly ordinary, but they were their own little piece
of Elvis Presley. It was the power of mana."Additional articles by Peter Howell
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