Revelations of Divine Love, Revelations of Divine Love

The impetus for this film came about almost accidentally, but in a way not dissimilar from Julian’s visionary experience. It was the spring-summer of 2017, and I’d just finished my first feature, A Feast of Man, and I felt utterly depleted.

My then-roommate—and co-writer, Laurence Bond, who starred in my first film—was at time earning his Masters in Medieval History at Columbia University, he asked if I’d like to hear his paper on Julian of Norwich. Suffice to say, I was very moved by this story—I’d never heard of her work, but her circumstances felt very similar to mine: we were roughly the same age, both buckling under the weight of weltschmerz, and wrested from despair by seemingly divine intervention. Julian saw Christ, and I saw Julian. Her account of these visions was so immediately cinematic to me, I thought it would make for a great film. What initially started as a short just turned, seemingly on its own, into a feature film –and eight years later, here we are.

That Julian is the first-known woman to write a book in English is pretty staggering, and still not widely known. The idea that, in the 14th century, a woman could voluntarily leave her family, her obligations, her duties, and spend the rest of her life in work and prayer on something so personal—it’s hard to conceive of even today. Who has that kind of time? And I can’t speak for the rest of the West, but in the US at least we have a very narrow idea in the mainstream of what women’s lives were like during the medieval era. We assume all women were illiterate, treated like livestock, devoid of any rich inner life but the reality is so much richer, so much more compelling.

Working from historical material, we drew where we could from the facts: the only verifiable proof of Julian’s existence is her work, but there is a mention of her in the will of Countess Ufford with a bequest to “Julian, an anchoress as Norwich, and Sarah, who lives with her.” So right there, I knew we’d have two other women in the story—Countess Ufford, and Sarah, Julian’s companion. And having Benedictine nuns in the story offered not only another example of women’s lives, but a useful depiction of the difference between communal religious life and the life of a holy hermit. Even though the story centres on Julian, I wanted to show as many “ways of being” for women as I could in the film: not just nuns but nobility, peasantry, merchant’s wives, poacher’s wives, a woman innkeeper, etc.

I cast women I knew who were performers, filmmakers, writers, artists. Three of the featured roles are played by fellow filmmakers: Hanna Edizel, who plays Sister Agnes, is an editor in addition to being a working actress. Ayanna Dozier, who plays Countess Ufford, and Marit Liang, who plays the Virgin Mary, are multidisciplinary filmmakers who appear on camera in their own work. This extended to the ensemble too […]: Isabel Pask who played Sarah, Valery Lessard who played Sybil, and Samantha Steinmetz who played Sister Beatrice were introduced to us through our casting agents, who knew exactly what we were going for and connected us with actors who understood the assignment—specifically, actors with an interest in history and a theatrical background, people who would appreciate the material of the story and the material limitations of the work on set.

There’s an original version of this script that’s written in medieval English, but we scrapped that idea pretty quickly! Creating an “accurate” depiction of the Middle Ages is a bit of a fool’s errand—we only have historical indicators of how people spoke and behaved, based on surviving materials and accounts. My guiding philosophy is that period films are about two eras: the era in which they’re set, and the era in which they’re made. The 14th-century setting is integral to the story, but as a filmmaker I’m using this era to speak about our own—a time of supposed “intellectual degeneration” (the so-called “Dark Ages,” a term coined by Petrarch in the 13th century!), of social and political upheaval, of negotiating the conflicting needs of the public, social world and the private life of an artist.

The most important part of this story, the tool that would put everything across to the viewer, was showing Julian’s experience as a matter of fact. Whether one believes in the veracity of religious visitations or not, it’s almost immaterial—in order for the film to work, we must accept Julian’s account on her own terms. Part of our methodology was imbuing the story with these banalities of anchoritic life: the solitude, the chores, and how the cloister contrasts with the community outside Julian’s anchorhold. Medieval life was very communal. Finding a balance between the sublime and the commonplace required us to depict both the wondrous and the banal.

Having electronic instruments in the score was baked in from the beginning. Zachary Koeber with whom we talked about the score on and off for years well before we started filming, is a multi-instrumentalist. In that way he’s kind of a one man band, and he was prepared to create whatever the score required to support the performances on screen.

When he started work on the score in earnest, I sent him examples of period music and more contemporary music that fit the mood: English folk songs from the era, music from other medieval films (Walerian Borowczyk’s “Blanche” was a big inspiration), even psychedelic music. I made sure to emphasize that synthesizers and electronic music were an integral part of the score, an instant anachronism that “teaches” the viewer how to watch the film but with a score still in alignment with the way music was composed and performed in the period.

Medieval art is innately psychedelic—it operates on a plane of allegory and metaphor, utilizing riotous colours and textures to convey narrative meaning. Medieval people may not have been word-literate, but they were image-literate, and understood these symbols to have great emotional and spiritual power. Think of the rich illuminations in books of hours, meticulously woven tapestries, intricately constructed stained-glass windows—all remarkable media that celebrate, rather than obscure, the process of making. In the Middle Ages to make art was to pay homage to God, and devotion to one’s craft was akin to religious practice.

Creating a contrast between Julian’s visionary life and her everyday life was central to the story from the outset: we used St. Augustine’s “City of God”/”City of Man” allegory as a starting point—the idea that the world made by man is inauthentic, and the heavenly world is real. By depicting Julian’s visionary life outside, with natural lighting, with wider framing, and her earthbound life as doll-like and artificial, we emphasized that these visions really did happen to her, that she had this genuine experience. To make a truly period-perfect religious film—especially on our rather modest budget—would have been impossible. But our goal from the outset was not replication or verisimilitude—it was to convey, through those same colours, textures, and symbols, a specific time and place in history. We looked to other eras of medieval revival for clues on how artists drew from the era in the past: William Morris’ designs and writings, Gothic-revival 19th-century architecture, the “Ren Faires” that emerged in California in the 1960s, to name a few.

In my own viewing habits I’m very drawn to anachronisms, to hand-made works, to films that utilize symbols and signifiers as a means of exposition and explanation. We were looking at other films that executed big ideas on small budgets: Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio,” Eric Rohmer’s “Perceval le Gallois,” and especially Robert Bresson’s “Lancelot du Lac.”. Throughout the pre-production and production of the film, we had a motto: “All of our dumb ideas are working!”

On a practical level, we employed a lot of nifty tricks to replicate specific textures and materials—all of the sets were built out of these huge sheets of pink insulation foam, which is very soft and pliant. Using wire brushes and a light paint wash, our art director, Grant Stoops, who is a trained painter, turned strips of foam into wooden timbers. Even the wall of the church is carved foam, sanded and painted to look like stone. The patterns on the floors were designed to evoke “diapering”, the repeating patterns found in the background of manuscript illuminations. And they were all meticulously painted by hand, sometimes only for a shot or two, like the scenes in Carrow Priory. And we all had a hand in building and painting these sets.

Making a medieval period piece feels a bit like cheating, sometimes, because you can draw so readily from this alphabet of allegory and symbolism. There are specific poses and gestures that are found throughout western medieval art, and paying homage to these works is a convenient way to convey and depict the era. On a purely practical level, we knew we had to really use as many variations of these sets as we could. And the sets themselves were quite small, close to the actual proportion of an anchoress’ cell.

Having the art history to draw on was essential here—we kept a little library at our studio of medieval art books, including photographs of pre-Gothic churches from the region, books on medieval illuminations and fashions, and more “contemporary” sources like Owen Jones’ Arts-and-Crafts-era database The Grammar of Ornament, drawings by Orson Welles, and may, many books on early silent films. In a lot of ways, making a low-budget film is not unlike the early days of silent cinema—they were operating within a narrow scope of framing and composition, limited by what the technology could afford. I consciously wanted to draw from this era of filmmaking, but I also wanted to give the crew and cast free reign to find their own mises en scène, to split the difference between the practical realities of what the coverage required and what felt natural and feasible to them in the moment.