'Lost in the Shuffle': Is a deck of cards the answer to a 500-year-old murder mystery?
"There are things that are apparent, right in front of you, that you will never see," magician Shawn Farquhar said
When you think of even the most amateur magicians, one of your first thoughts is likely some sort of card trick. But in Jon Ornoy's documentary Lost in the Shuffle, famed magician, two-time world champion Shawn Farquhar, leads us through mysteries hidden in the artwork of every single deck of cards.
In the film, which was part of this years Hot Docs Festival in Toronto, Farquhar travels to six countries trying to prove a theory that each deck of cards has hidden clues to a 1498 conspiracy to kill a French King. Farquhar also creates a new routine that tells the story Charles VIII’s demise, with the help of a number of different magicians.
The collaboration between Farquhar and Ornoy began when the filmmaker went to Farquhar's Hidden Wonders theatre in British Columbia for his birthday and had such a good time Ornoy sent the magician an email after the show. They started chatting and hanging out together, when Ornoy initially had the idea to do a tour film centred around Farquhar's work, but then that changed.
"One day he pulled out his laptop and showed me this PowerPoint that he put together about this court card conspiracy story, ... hidden in the art of every deck of cards you've ever held are the clues to this 500-year-old murder, and that was definitely a light bulb. That's a pretty good hook," Ornoy explained to Yahoo Canada.
It terms of what made this a worthy story to explore, Farquhar said it's "odd" that for the bulk of his career he used a deck of cards as a tool, but never really looked at them.
"This friend of mine Steve Beam did a little thing where he fooled me with a card trick, where the queen turned around, and I'm like, 'How did you do that?' He said, 'It's in every deck Shawn,'" Farquhar shared. "I immediately was grabbing people's decks of cards, we were at a conference going, 'They really are in every brand. What? How did I not see that?' And that's a big question, that there are things that are apparent, right in front of you, that you will never see. That got me looking at, what else have I missed."
Travelling to multiple countries and conducting a number of interviews, Ornoy had the ambitious tasks of narrowing down all that footage in a way that serviced the historical aspect of this story, and the magic.
"I had planned out basically every scene for the entire sequence of the film, ... and then we sat down and started editing and most of that went out the window," he said. "We had a fair amount of control of what we're doing, this was not like a vérité documentary where we're following action as it's happening, ... but even then, in the process of making it things change, or someone says something you weren't expecting, and then you have to be able to kind of flow with that."
"There's multiple different kinds of story threads, so figuring out a way to make those all kind of integrate into a cohesive narrative, that was the real challenge."
'I can't think of another art that has that wide a spectrum for a single subject'
Magic as a medium is really able to grab people's attention, making some obsessed with trying to figure out how a magician performs a trick, while others are just amazed, and maybe a little skeptical.
"Every night when I do a show at Hidden Wonders and as I'm performing I take a mental note, a picture of the audience, because I can see there's that nine-year-old kid ... in the front corner, with the 40-year-old guy who was super skeptical, the 22-year-old hipster who was dragged there by his girlfriend," Farquhar said. "I have just about everybody in this room, the demographics."
"I can't think of another art that has that wide a spectrum for a single subject."
In terms of where Farquhar believes his magic will evolve in the future, he said he'll never stop learning.
"I have more than 10,000 volumes of books in my home, just on magic," he said. "And some of them are in languages that I don't understand, so I will Google Translate read the book."
"There's a new book every month from magicians nowadays, ... and I buy them all. I'm addicted to it. ... I see some, they call themselves the master magician, I'll always be a student. I teach, I call it a workshop, ... [but] I still want to [have an] insatiable appetite for learning."
