The Testament of Ann Lee painstakingly re-creates Shaker craft

Production designer Sam Bader describes what it took to bring the Shakers' frugal yet beautiful world to life for the film The Testament of Ann Lee, created by the duo behind last year's The Brutalist.

Directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written with her creative and life partner Brady Corbet, The Testament of Ann Lee biopic tells the story of one of The Shakers' founding figures as she leads her followers to establish their first settlements in colonial America.

The gender of the Christian sect's leaders is just one of the quirks that led society at the time to be suspicious of them, but has earned them a semi-mythic status today.

The Shakers, named for the fact that they shook while communing with God and practised ecstatic dance, are also probably the only minor religious sect to leave a lasting legacy on design.

Their pursuit of simplicity and functionality led them to be thought of as "modern before the modernists".

The film shows all of these facets of Shaker life as being part of a cohesive whole, driven by the visions and beliefs of "Mother" Ann Lee, played by actor Amanda Seyfried.

"Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow," Lee says to her flock as they scurry around her, exactingly turning timber chair legs, fixing bentwood oval boxes with delicate swallowtail joints, and using wall-mounted peg-boards to clear floors of furniture to host worship rituals.

The quote is commonly attributed to the real Ann Lee and working in this way was, for the Shakers, a religious act in itself.

"It was a commitment to the craft, to living off of the land, and to this sort of ever-increasing striving towards a notion of perfection – perfection being this iterative process of constantly improving upon that which they created," The Testament of Ann Lee production designer Sam Bader told Dezeen.

The Shakers started with the existing Georgian architecture and furniture designs of their time, he said, and improved upon them as they went.

"It's [about] finding a kind of spiritual harmony through work and through craft," he said.

The starting point for Bader's production design for The Testament of Ann Lee was less about the details of Shaker craft, however, and more about creating an emotional and aesthetic journey that would mirror the protagonists' physical one.

With a background in abstract painting, he sees film, too, as "a kind of abstraction" with a temporal form shaped by look and feel, he told Dezeen.

The movie opens in Manchester, England, but following a revelation, Ann Lee and a small band of her fellow Shakers decide to resettle in America, making the perilous journey by ship.

"The film always, in Mona's and my mind, wanted to start non-rectilinear and muddled and messy and chaotic through Manchester, and then the moment you're on the ship, for it to open wide and be horizontal lines and open sea and open sky," Bader said.

They then planned a transition via New York City, which Bader described as "freshly sawn, newly built, still a little bit of the chaos of city life, but with wider streets, broader proportions".

"And for all of that to bring us, spatially and visually, into this place of utopia, of harmony, and of nature as a dominating element that co-exists along with what people were able to build in such a remote place," he continued.

This final setting is Niskayuna, a forested area upriver from the city that became the site of the first Shaker settlement. Scenes here were filmed partly on a carefully constructed set in Hungary and partly in the US at sites including the Hancock Shaker Village, a 1780s Shaker commune that now serves as an open-air museum.

Bader worked extensively with real artisans practising historical crafts across the locations, endeavouring to capture both period details and processes.

In one sequence, the camera follows the felling of a real tree, the squaring of its wood by axe into posts, and its construction into frames and window mullions – actions that were performed by an academic of 18th-century timber framing who ended up acting alongside the cast.

His dedication to accuracy extended to making the adhesive for the build the traditional way, out of rabbit skin.

Off-camera, another craftsperson, from Romania, provided some 500 panes of hand-blown glass for all of the sets in Hungary – a detail that hugely shaped the quality of light in the film and helps give the film a look that cinematographer William Rexer described as "modern Baroque".

"The hand-blown glass that William can push light through breaks things up and makes them a little more wavy," said Bader. "It's something you really rarely ever see in film these days. Those brought [the sets] to life."

The attention to detail was such that it's difficult to distinguish the scenes shot in Hungary from those shot at the Shaker village, where they were, after gaining the trust of the museum custodians, allowed to film in closed rooms with still-functional historic timber furniture and joinery.

"I got fooled the first time I saw the cut of the film, because some of the spaces we built in Hungary were, to give credit to this whole team, so unimpeachable that you really do lose yourself," said Bader.

One of these spaces is the interior of the Shaker meeting and dance hall. This was the biggest set the Testament of Ann Lee crew built, using an old stone barn as the scaffolding.

The barn had an expansive vaulted ceiling that the team preserved and featured, using it to bring a sense of verticality and spaciousness to the interior shots.

The room is often filmed with a view of its side wall, where there is a mural of the Tree of Life, a famous "gift drawing" by painter Hannah Cohoon, who is often associated with the Shakers.

Bader says this is the only "impressionistic flourish" that he and Fastvold allowed themselves – the artwork wasn't painted until 60 years after Ann Lee's death, and even after it was, the Shakers did not decorate their walls with murals.

"But we felt the tree telling us that it's a recurring symbol throughout the film from, obviously, the Garden of Eden to the orchard where Ann Lee lives out her final days and this vision that she keeps having," said Bader.

"So we made a conscious choice to embellish in that way and to create this very stark, strong piece of iconography."

Shaker style has been emulated over the years in furniture such as the classic J39 chair by Børge Mogensen and the more recent Peg system by Studio Gorm and Rodan coffee table by Pinch.

Interior designers, too, have channelled their influence in spaces such as the Círculo Mexicano hotel in Mexico by Ambrosi Etchegaray and the Flourist bakery in Canada by Ste Marie.

Last year, the Vitra Design Museum held an exhibition on Shaker design featuring both historic artefacts and contemporary reinterpretations, with an exhibition design by Formafantasma.

The imagery is courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

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