Review: “The Testament of Ann Lee”

Ann Lee, the Mother of Shakerism, was undoubtedly a commanding figure in her time. In the new film about her by Mona Fastvold, her brother and her disciples run through a New World forest, carrying a heavy trunk of canvas tents. The idea is to find a secluded glen where they can practice the worship Mother Ann has ordained. Would I have crossed the stormy Atlantic to follow the twitching finger of fate? Maybe yes, maybe no. I’m plenty attracted to Shaken housewares, especially those seductive oval storage boxes, but they hadn’t yet been invented when she made her crossing. I’m guessing that I would have stayed put in England.

But Ann and her band (“The Shakers”) succeeded for a time, with a constellation of settlements and thousands of followers. At the height of the movement, there were some 6,000 disciples spread out from the Hudson to faraway Kentucky. Almost three centuries later, there are still two practicing Shakers living in the settlement called Sabbathday Lake.

There were good reasons for the movement’s relative longevity. With the exception of Lee, the communities were more-or-less egalitarian, insulated from privation by their fanatical industry. Shakers bought and sold like Junior Achievement capitalists, and they cultivated warm relations with their neighbors. They also tapped into a strain of come-one-come-all. Africans made up a small number of communitarians, but as the movie makes clear, they were an occasional presence.

Yet the fact that they dwindled was fore-ordained. Ann’s special focus was rigorous celibacy. She lost four babies before they turned one and she believed that fornication was an iron barrier between the longing soul and the love of God. The rule in the settlements was stubborn segregation, with separate accommodations for men and women, right down to the entrances to their common gathering spaces. There were children in the settlements, but they had been born before conversion. The result is that Shakerism missed the Mormon trajectory of booming fertility and rapid expansion. Ann Lee was the very opposite of Big Love.

What else she was, however, does not quite come into focus. Fastvold’s film is a dutiful slog, more Wikipedia entry than evocative film. A soft voice on the soundtrack calls out the punctuation marks in her story, but the film generally flouts the ethos of show-don’t-tell. The film runs like a series of embroidered panels, telling the tale of a medieval saint. There is the time that Ann prayed for deliverance from a storm. The time that she confronted the slave traders in the market. There is the barest hint of psychological complexity, including a smidgen of sexual kink. But the portrait here takes Shakerism at its word, a community of iron-clad spiritual discipline, and the cultish elevation of a woman without ambivalence. I missed one of the most interesting things about them, their austere aesthetic of functional design. Where did it come from? What were its analogues?

At the same time, Fastvold’s’s film is not an empty experience. Two things, at least, caught my attention. We learn very little about the religious landscape on which Ann played out her personal revelation, but she does appropriate the technology of confession as a way of dealing with her followers’ anxieties and binding them into an intimate community. In one illustrative scene, a beleaguered mother admits that she thinks bad thoughts about her children. There are simply too many of them, and they make too much noise. All she wants is peace and quiet. Ann’s new religion allows her to unburden herself and invites the community into the experience of disgorging. We are left to imagine the feeling of relief and the seal of intimacy that descends on the community. They become the keepers of each other’s secrets.

The other phenomenon that Fastvold renders is the importance of movement in the Shaker covenant. They are, after all, Shaker believers. As Fastvold understands it, their movement is not a matter of subtle vibration, but a swooping choreography of rough and gentle. It would be no exaggeration to call it orgiastic. In the early scenes in England, the devotees writhe in close quarters. Eventually their dance becomes more chaste and controlled, but this is clearly an embodied religious practice, exactly what is missing in most forms of worship. The thrilling exceptions are the dances of Turkish dervishes, all-male dancing in courts of the Chasidim, and the rapturous experience of handling snakes.

If I connect to the story of Mother Ann Lee, it is most certainly to the tradition of these sacred dances. Were they exactly what Fastvold shows us on the screen? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. The notion of an embodied spirituality is sufficient to trigger worthwhile imaginings and reignite interest in the Shaker story. Faith is supposed to be a sensory overload, and I envy the tradition of Sabbathday Lake.

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The foregoing article is my personal opinion and not that of any other organization or person.