The Testament of Ann Lee · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the camera in the meeting room. For long stretches it just holds — frontal, patient, planted at the height of a witness in a bare wooden room, letting the ranked bodies fill the wide frame. Then the shaking starts, and the camera loses its composure. It goes handheld, breaks its own steady line, and pushes in among the worshippers as if the spirit that seized them has seized it too. William Rexer, who shot the film, describes the camera as a participant rather than an observer. That is the whole picture in one gesture: an image that watches belief until it can no longer keep from joining it.

Most biopics of a visionary reach for the face, the speech, the moment of decision. Fastvold reaches for the body. Late in his life Deleuze asked cinema for something odd — 'give me a body,' he wrote, meaning a cinema that stops using bodies to carry out actions and instead lets them carry time: the tired body, the waiting body, the ceremonial body that endures rather than accomplishes. He called it a cinema of the body, and it fits Ann Lee exactly, because for the Shakers worship was the body. Not a doctrine illustrated by dance, but a doctrine that existed only as dance — the march, the trembling, the wordless cry of 'gift.' When Seyfried shakes, nothing is being depicted. Something is being done, and the doing is the theology.

Deleuze had a finer name for a posture that shows you a whole relation at once: the gest. A gest is a bodily attitude that exposes what a society, or a faith, actually is. Here the gest is spatial and collective. The film needs its 2.39:1 width, Rexer says, because only that horizontal field can hold the Shaker formations as legible geometry — the facing rows, the lines, the circles, men on one side and women on the other, equal and apart. That geometry is the argument. A church of celibate equals, gender balanced by the plain symmetry of who stands where. You don't need the sermon; the ranks say it. Against the severe canvas of bare wood and white walls, the moving body becomes the only ornament and the only scripture.

And then there is transport — the thing the whole film is built to reach. Deleuze has a phrase for the moment a figure goes still inside while the world pours through it: the movement of the world, the dance that absorbs the dancer. The worshipper stops being the author of her motion and becomes its site. This is where the two temperatures of the cinematography earn themselves. The composed stillness is a body that still belongs to itself. The fevered handheld is a body given over — and the camera, joining, makes the giving-over visible from inside rather than watching it from a pew. That kinetic contagion is close to what Deleuze meant by free indirect vision in political cinema: the camera stops reporting on the believers and starts seeing with them, its eye and theirs fused in one possessed look.

What holds all this together is the title's plainest word. Testament. Ann Lee does not discover that she is the female Christ; she must testify it into being, and convince her followers and herself in the same breath. Deleuze called this fabulation — a person caught in the act of legending herself, making a truth by telling it with enough conviction that others come to stand inside it. It is the creative side of what he named the powers of the false: not lying, but forging a truth that did not exist before the forging. Seyfried plays precisely this threshold — a face working to believe what it is about to require others to believe. And the stakes are larger than one woman, because Lee is trying to raise a people who are not yet there. A celibate, egalitarian sect planted in a hostile New World is a community that has to be willed into existence, dance by dance, hymn by hymn. Deleuze said modern political cinema begins where 'the people are missing' — where the film's task is to summon a people rather than represent one. Few films make that summoning as literal as this.

The craft debts are exact. The chaptered life told through original songs, with an embedded composer's score as the spine and not the wallpaper, comes straight from Vox Lux and, before it, The Childhood of a Leader — Daniel Blumberg here doing what Scott Walker did there. The photochemical 35mm engineered for 70mm, the outsider broken then vindicated by history, the Hungarian-rooted repertory crew: that is The Brutalist, one year on. The candlelit hush of plain rooms is Fastvold's own The World to Come. Further back, two ancestors: The Red Shoes, which first made choreography the dramatic climax rather than a decorative pause, and Black Narcissus, whose chiaroscuro of religious enclosure pushed a female community toward its visionary crack.

What the film does to the form is quietly radical. It takes the most exhausted shape in prestige cinema — the great-figure biopic — and refuses to explain its subject. It films a faith as motion, lets song carry the narrative that dialogue usually carries, and asks the body to hold the time. Next time, watch the camera's discipline break. The instant it abandons its post and joins the shaking, the film is no longer showing you belief. It is believing.