How cinema rebuilt the Shakers’ world, the spiritual roots of modern design

Directed by Mona Fastvold - already known for The World to Come and for the screenplay of The Brutalist, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival - The Testament of Ann Lee is a historical and musical film that chronicles the birth of the Shakers, a religious movement founded in the 18th century by Ann Lee, a charismatic, visionary leader who turned a creed into a communal way of life. In an America still rigidly structured by social hierarchies, the community stood out for an uncompromising idea of equality and inclusion, radical in many ways even today. The only non-negotiable condition was celibacy. In the film, her story unfolds through music—more than a dozen Shaker hymns reworked into choreographed sequences by Celia Rowlson-Hall, with original music by Daniel Blumberg—and through the production design of Samuel Bader. We met with Bader to hear what it meant to reconstruct this world on screen, shaping spaces and objects to convey a lived sense of discipline, labour, and collective life.

A nineteenth-century American religious community that ends up inspiring generations of designers and artists is something quite rare—so rare that it’s difficult to imagine in concrete terms today. “The Shakers have become almost a concept, rather than something we can visualize as a lived experience,” says Samuel Bader, introducing his approach to the production design. For him, working on the film did not mean reconstructing a ready-made aesthetic. “What struck me right away was the idea of a completely collective authorship.” In Shaker culture, he insists, “there is never a person’s name on top of anything.” Objects, techniques, tools, furniture are born out of shared knowledge. “From butter to furniture, from tools to household inventions, everything belongs to the community.” It’s a principle that, he adds, he tried to carry into the making of the sets as well, working closely with artisans and specialized craftspeople.

Today, there are very few living Shakers. “Three, apparently,” Bader says. “They live in Maine, probably on Sabbath Day, I’d say.” During the film’s preparation there was no direct contact; instead, he explains, the research ran through museums and archives. “I went to see archives and surviving Shaker artifacts,” he says, adding: “We collaborated with the Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York, and the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts.” Not as a repertoire to copy verbatim, but as a set of visual and material cues—enough to enter the key ideas of a culture Bader still calls “radical.”

“What I didn’t know—and what surprised me most—was the extent to which some of the forms we associate with the Shakers today derive from other traditions,” says Bader. “Colonial, Georgian… English, Mancunian.” “From ladderback chairs to weaves, what really distinguishes Shaker objects—and what seems so singular and iconic to us—is actually deeply iterative,” he continues. A system that takes pre-existing forms and repeats them, refines them, stabilizes them until they become a language. And for anyone tasked, this time, with translating that logic into production design, the question is inevitable: “How do you absorb so much visual information and distill it down to the really essential forms?”

“Shakers were undoubtedly at their peak in the mid-19th century, in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s,” says Bader. This is the moment when “the settlements had the largest population” and production peaks, including “furniture, cabinetry, inventions, and household objects.” Then the line of reception becomes more elusive. “It’s curious how these things come in and out of fashion,” he observes. “I certainly don’t have the answer … but I wonder when this resurrection really started. My gut tells me it was the second half of the twentieth century.”

Samuel Bader

For Bader, the method is visual before it is philological. “It was like drawing from life: it’s not like you start with eyelashes, you draw a gesture.” And that “gesture,” in this case, was tone and palette. Manchester was meant to feel “messy, imperfect,” with “life spilling out into the streets, people living on top of each other, everything feeling warped and old.” The direct reference, he says, “was an engraving by William Hogarth.” The result is a range of “murkier, more saturated” colors—browns, burgundy, olive green.

When the film shifts to America, the air changes. “New York—New York, New Amsterdam, whatever you want to call it—must feel fresh, bright, full of sunshine.” Spaces, Bader says, needed a “fresh-sawn” quality, sharper and more open. And it’s telling that he and Fastvold arrived at the same reference “independently.” “We found ourselves converging on Hammershøi,” he says, with its “dusty blues” and darks that turn into “chalky blacks.” Into the costumes come “touches of yellow, touches of red.” And the Shaker world, at that point, shifts register too. “It becomes lighter, more exposed,” in harmony with landscape and light, and it demands a search for nuances you can almost barely see. “I don’t know how many tests we must have done” for fixtures, benches, doors, and windows, because “it’s a very subtle shade” and “had to be perfect” against the costumes.

Samuel Bader

An approach that reflects Bader’s training in painting and film. He recalls falling in love with analog photography and celluloid—“holding it” long enough to understand its chemistry—and coming out of years of abstract painting. Caravaggio, Francis Guy, and John Lewis Crimmel resonate in the film’s images, but so does “Paul Sandby, who did incredible watercolors of the time and was a huge reference for us.” Alongside these art-historical touchstones, Bader also points to images made by the Shakers themselves: village views he calls “naïve,” yet invaluable because they “tell you so much about the layout of villages and spaces,” to the point of becoming the informational basis for “the layout of the film.”

If asked about the most significant set, Bader points to the meeting house, the hall where the final dance takes place. “The path to get to that set was, in many ways, the path of the entire film.” There were limited resources and little time, yet “we had to do something very big.” During location scouting, they found a farm structure used for storage, “chock full of wreckage, boat hulls, stuff thrown there.” Above it, however, was a vaulted wooden ceiling from the early nineteenth century. “It was perfect,” Bader says, and building it from scratch would have meant “twice the time, twice the cost.” So they chose a radical but practical shortcut: “tear down all the non-load-bearing walls and build the meeting house inside that shell.” The paradox is that, in the finished film, that decisive element remains almost invisible, “five to ten percent of the composition.” But it’s what holds the whole set together. “That room, its story,” Bader says, “is reflected in almost every set of the film.”

The same principle guides the village construction scenes, where the production design had to show a process, not just an end result. “It was important that everything looked like the result of communal making. Not something built for the camera, but something that exists because it has to exist.” “I spent entire weekends between upstate New York and the Berkshires, knocking on the doors of artisans and woodworkers,” Bader says. The decisive encounter was with a historic carpentry specialist who would also end up in the film. “He told me, ‘I have all those things, and they really work. I come, I show you how it’s done. I’ll put on a costume and drive in front of the camera.’” In the film, he appears alongside Lewis Pullman as they cut down a tree, then as he works on uprights and fittings and inserts hand-blown glass into frames. This is where production design stops being a backdrop. “Somehow, this way of working embodies the spirit of the film, the spirit of the Shakers.”