Toronto-based filmmaker Ron Mann’s office looks like a comic book store. Located in a dilapidated building on Mercer Street, it’s sprinkled with a chaotic collection of assorted knick-knacks and doohickeys: a framed, original Doonesbury cartoon, a complete set of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse action figures, bobbleheads, old lunchboxes, and collectible memorabilia from his own films (I notice he has a Tales of the Rat Fink novelty mousepad).
With documentary films ranging from comic books (Comic Book Confidential), marijuana (Grass), Rochdale College (Dream Tower), early rock ‘n’ roll (Twist), and Woody Harrelson (Go Further), Ron Mann is invariably described in reviews as a “counterculture documentarian”—or, in some of the more conservative publications, a hippie. Mann acknowledges the truth to these labels.
“I see myself more as a cultural historian than a filmmaker,” says Mann. “What I really want to do is turn people onto different ideas and alternative culture that are not exposed in the mainstream media. Really, what I’m fighting is the status quo. And also, [I want] to resurrect history and document our times, so that there is a record of who we are that isn’t, y’know, mainstream.”
As the conversation progresses, Mann gradually moves from accepting the counterculture label. “I started to document what I was a fan of, and I was a fan of jazz music, because I worked at the jazz department at Sam’s, and the beat poets who I related to, and comic books—I mean, I grew up reading Mad Magazine. So I’m really more of a fan of the work that I’ve documented.”
Mann’s enthusiasm for his subjects can be seen in every frame of his films, not least with his latest, Know Your Mushrooms, opening for a limited engagement at the Royal on January 30th. While the topic is mushrooms, the film is fast-paced and entertaining in Mann’s typical fashion. In addition to their well-established food value, the hallucinogenic, aphrodisiacal, and medicinal uses of mushrooms and fungi are explored, as well as the thriving mushroom subculture (including glimpses of the Telluride Mushroom Festival).
Mann first imagined Know Your Mushrooms when editing a compilation of “mushrooms in the movies” with friend and director Jim Jarmusch. “He was encouraging me all along to make this movie, and he would say things like, ‘Did you know that the DNA of the mushroom is closer to a human than it is a plant?’ There’s these fungi facts that just flipped me out. And to go as an ethnographic filmmaker into this subculture…it turns out there are a lot of people who are attracted to mushrooms.”
The topic of counterculture rises again, but at this point, Mann has firmly established himself as an auteur—a director whose films are stylistically or thematically consistent. Stylistically, Know Your Mushrooms is as light and playful as Mann’s previous pop documentaries. Thematically, Mann depicts his subject as a bold piece of alternative culture, misunderstood by the fearful and ignorant status quo. He even finds two bona fide counterculture protagonists in Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans, a pair of colourful mushroom experts far outside the mainstream. Leave it to Ron Mann to create a polemic about mushrooms.
Like Mann’s other work, Know Your Mushrooms is a plea for adventure and open-mindedness, a spirit that Mann contends died with Reaganism. “I am nostalgic for that period,” he says of the 1960s, “mostly ‘cause, y’know, I was smoking pot and sleeping with women, and all the good things you go to university for.”
The laughter subsides, and Mann describes the torturous process of making Grass—three years, he claims, spent virtually isolated in a rat-infested office, sifting through countless vintage documents and propaganda films. He finished the film, he says, only out of the conviction that a movie like Grass had to be made. “There are only two real reasons to make a film,” he says. “It’s about something you really like, or something you really dislike.” Does Mann advocate for a return to the liberal values of the ‘60s, or is he just one of Canada’s pre-eminent fanboys? His answers suggest both.
