Starting this past Saturday, Level 2L of the Johnson museum is playing host to an unusual yet thought-provoking film installation. Looking Pretty for God, a documentary by Omer Fast, explores an unlikely relationship: a photo shoot and a funeral home. Fast, an Israeli filmmaker who recently won the 2009 Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, challenges conventional media’s portrayal of reality. Toying with the distinction between audio and visual media in Looking Pretty for God, Fast uses interviews with funeral home employees as a means to narrate footage of a photo shoot of children. At the Johnson until Jan. 24, this pseudo-documentary may not impress you at first, but its provocative motivation gradually becomes a fun puzzle to solve.

On a basic level, the film illuminates the diverse components that make funeral homes such idiosyncratic institutions. Even for funeral home managers, death is indeed a peculiar form of business. The film muses at how, for these people, death becomes a mundane issue on which their livelihood is based. They even give an overview of the industry’s history, telling how family-owned funeral homes have turned into large conglomerates. One anonymous narrator, an employee of the funeral home, discusses death as a consumer issue — funerals are in fact one of the largest consumer purchases that one makes in life. With a business-as-usual tone of boredom, he describes the thought process of the “consumer” in purely economic terms, as though he were buying a car.

Unfortunately, in such business transactions the family of the deceased forms an association between the feeling of loss and the employees of the funeral home. The narrator recollects having seen clients in public places and inducing them to cry based on the memory that he evokes. Such experiences thicken one’s skin over time, he admits.

The interviews also uncover the process of embalming. Mortuary cosmetics, not so unlike the cosmetics that normally come to mind, are the final touches on the embalming process, and are essential to the perception that the funeral attendees get while viewing the dead. Because so much is at stake in a person’s last glimpse of their loved one, mortuary cosmetics, and the creation of a particular aesthetic, are delicate processes.

Another anonymous narrator specializing in this trade describes his aim to produce an elegant look on the corpse’s face, though one that is unmistakably dead (for lack of a better word). For this reason, they attend the body with makeup while sealing the eyes and mouth shut. A number of other techniques are used to preserve and prepare it for presentation, making it a carnal form of artistic impression. One narrator remarked on the sense of transition that takes place in the dead body during the process of embalming. He could not help wonder if his work made him witness to the soul leaving the body, or some other invisible departure.

Morbid and beautiful, the subject matter appears even more bizarre given its strange visual presentation, which seems misplaced altogether. Many of the shots are candid in portraying the emptiness of the funeral home, slowly moving from empty caskets to empty rooms, movements and images that capture the solitude of the business. The majority of the film, however, focuses on long shots of children during the narration as someone puts make-up on their face, preparing them for a photo shoot. Other than mortuary cosmetics, there is no obvious connection between the children and the idea of funeral homes. Sometimes the kids lip-sync what narrators are saying, and, given the somber mood, you wonder if Fast intends for you to laugh.

Perhaps Fast felt the need to add an element of comic relief, or to offset death with life — you can decide for yourself. A likely possibility is that he combines unrelated ideas to form a cohesive narrative with presentation and appearance as the main focuses. Says Fast, “The work of funeral directors falls somewhere between makeup artistry, plastic surgery, sculpture, PR, grief counseling, event planning and magic.” By combining two unlikely scenarios, the photo shoot and the funeral home, he creates a singular focus on self-image that transcends life and death.