why yes, i do have 'The Testament of Ann Lee' thoughts
Maybe I would have been a practicing Catholic for longer if the music was any good. My memories of mass, like any child's memories, are of abject boredom. If we were kneeling, I'd amuse myself by surreptitiously licking the pew in front of me, such was the depth of my ennui. (It tasted terrible, like burnt cork, but I kept doing it.) Our parish lacked any especially awesome decor—no beauty and terror, just humble brick and a smattering of tiny ceramic bas-reliefs depicting the Stations of the Cross— and the organist seemed to play the notes one at a time, rather than in chords.
When I studied abroad in Prague, my host father was Catholic enough to go to church—kind of unusual, the Czechs are fairly agnostic as a bloc—and he brought me to Easter Mass at a spectacular cathedral with an organ that really smacked. That organ went to eleven. I think there were some string instruments involved too. The music got me a little hype, thinking of the rolling away of the stone, the empty tomb, hahaha, joke's on you suckerrrs.
The main thing I remember from all those Sundays at mass are the priests singing out of tune. Imagine the phrase "let us proclaim the mystery of faith"...a phrase that goes pretty hard...you could even imagine it in a dramatic pop song...but delivered in an atonal honk from a man in long robes. The mystery of faith will remain a mystery if you don't sell it effectively. People will be too bored to pry further. Maybe that's the point?
I watched The Testament of Ann Lee last weekend and I'm never going to emotionally recover. It was a fantastic movie, looked like a zillion bucks on a $10 mil budget, and the music is stuck in my head. The songs are not particularly complicated or showy, but they are delivered with heartfelt repetition, phrases worked over and over, mimicking the pious rhythms of the diligent Shakers, who find God in the daily grind as well as the occasional choreographed rave. Organic instrumentation, fiddles played with plenty of friction, percussion in the form of loud HUHs of breathing and the whacks of frenzied hands on homespun cloth.
"All is Summer" could be a Sufjan Stevens song with a couple of tweaks. I just had to look up what kind of Christian Sufjan Stevens is (he told the A.V. Club he went to "a kind of Anglo-Catholic church" in 2005) and huh, he's pretty quiet about his faith when asked in interview format. Every reference to his Christianity on his Wikipedia page is him being like, "eh, I don't wanna talk about it." Kinda neat. Certainly not evangelism in the mode of an Ann Lee.
Amanda Seyfried has a beautiful voice and has now taken on three extremely iconic and different musical roles, taking place in three different centuries? Why is no one talking about this.
There's a sequence in The Testament Of Ann Lee that shows her giving birth to four children, all of whom died in infancy, set to a song called "Beautiful Treasures." It fucked me all the way up. Now that I have a baby, and because I'm the most sensitive person on planet Earth, I have a hard time with crying babies in movies. There are also scenes featuring crying babies in One Battle After Another and Marty Supreme. The prestige cinema industrial complex is out to get me personally.
After Ann Lee lost her children, she doubled down on spirituality; the narrator in the movie puts it this way: "With nothing left to lose, [she] boldly converted her suffering into evangelism." Have you ever read the book of Job? Everything in Job's life gets ruined, all because God and Satan made a bet on Polymarket, and yet his faith remains. I wish there was a way to live my life with the boldness of having nothing left to lose...without actually losing anything. Ha!
The other thing that the Shaker songs in Ann Lee reminded me of were some of the songs on Fiona Apple's Fetch The Bolt Cutters, the ones that utilized repetition and organic rhythmic elements to create hypnotic meditations. Chanting, tapping, saying the same thing over and over: "Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies"; "On I go, not toward or away." Fiona Apple said in a New York Magazine interview that the lyrics of "On I Go" came from repetitive movement: "When I walk, I walk on rhythm, and I have to keep that rhythm going for the whole time that I’m walking. It usually means that I end up singing along, at least in my head." Something Shaker-ish in there, finding rhythm in working, finding meaning in work, finding meaning in rhythm.
It's sick as hell that Ann Lee went from Manchester to America to start a religious movement so her people could basically dance and yell in the woods. (Please don't tell me if the woods-dancing and woods-yelling was a cinematic dramatization, I don't wanna hear it.) Religious freedom and 'empty' land go hand in hand, it's hard to act a fool for the Lord in an old city full of claustrophobically gorgeous buildings and busy streets.
At the end of my abroad program, we were all staying in a rustic...inn?? An hour outside of Prague, and it was quite isolated with a lot of farmlands and low wooden fences and stuff, and myself and a couple of the other program students started talking a big game about how we were all going to get naked and run around in the dark after dinner. We didn't chicken out either, almost everyone did it. Drinking a bunch of slivovitz definitely helped. It was incredible. One of the best nights of my life. If there isn't any other light around, moonlight actually lights stuff?? We were running around and dancing and yelling. It felt like God would have approved. Especially the nude part—Adam and Eve putting on clothes was more or less where all the trouble started.
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