Wolf Whistle

On April 8, 2015 By kittycalashIn History, Literature, Living History, TV Review3 Comments

Thomas Cromwell, Hans Holbein the Younger. The Frick Collection,1915.1.76

At last it has arrived: Wolf Hall. I waited, and did not use a proxy server to watch it early. Just as well that I watch PBS online as I have, thus far, watched the first episode three times.

At last I can understand people’s enthusiasm for historical programs some of us seethe at and cannot watch: my knowledge of the Tudors and their material world is limited enough that I am captivated and not annoyed (except by Anne Boleyn’s wrinkled silk satin bodice, which is striking in its puckers) and I read the books when they came out, and have thus forgotten enough of the details to be merely annoyed and not enraged at changes. (Other, real, critics have caught the language changes in the scene with Wolsey; Mantel is better, of course.)

The third Wolf-watching was with Mr S, who was suitably impressed by the low-light filming. As a former photographer who did a lot of night photography, improper and unbelievable lighting in film does cause an outbreak of caustic commentary. Not this time (he merely noted the fill light on Liz Cromwell’s face in one scene). With 20,000 pounds spent on candles, the BBC did this one right– and lucky for them the advance in camera technology.

But forgot the astronomical cost of all those tapers, that’s not the point: the point is what was believable and how the staging and lighting were used. I believed Wolf Hall all the more because of the low light, indoors and out, matching the time of day. I know how dim it is to light only with candles, and what a pain it is to make them, and how expensive. Light is money, whether you’re paying Ameren, National Grid, or the candlestick maker.

Aside from Hilary Mantel’s brilliant stories and all those candles, what makes this Wolf Hall good television? You know what I’m going to say: the authenticity. No, there are no Tudor accents, late or otherwise; these folks use our vernacular. And excellent arguments can be had about the historical accuracy of Mantel’s characters.

There are other arguments about the material details:

“The dull palette used – presumably in conscious contrast to The Tudors – created an ambience which, at worst, was lacklustre or, at best, homely. And it is that homeliness that concerns me most.

The homely is unthreatening. So, we are invited to view a ‘Tudor world’ as we know it or, rather, as we would like it to be. For instance, I was struck by how classless the society was – social gradation seemed to have disappeared both in the interactions and the interiors. There was little sense (as there is in the novels) of the heavy distaste for a man of such lowly birth as Cromwell’s; there was limited hauteur in a Norfolk or, indeed, the king. Meanwhile, the buildings which were home to Cromwell – still, at this point a lawyer in Wolsey’s service – seemed to lack none of the late-medieval conveniences afforded to the higher born and bettered housed. This is a world which has been domesticated for us so that it is tame, familiar and quintessentially English.”

Anne Boleyn
by Unknown artist
oil on panel, late 16th century (circa 1533-1536)
21 3/8 in. x 16 3/8 in. (543 mm x 416 mm)
Purchased, 1882. NPG 668 [Britain}

I will say that I was struck not just by the cleanliness of everything in an age before detergents (the blacksmith’s yard is remarkably pristine) and the amount of stuff in Cromwell’s house, but also by the softness of class lines. An argument could be made that depicting that much background detail would distract from the larger story, that of Cromwell and Anne and Thomas More, and the dissolution of the Catholic church in England.*

I know Cromwell ended up with riches but on the BBC he seemed to start ahead of where I thought he was at the start of the novel, mercenary and mercantile background aside.

Still: the spirit of the story and of Mantel’s Cromwell seem well-drawn here, and that’s what makes the difference between a series of living Holbeins and a gripping tale. That’s also what makes the difference between museum mannequins and costumed interpreters: emotional authenticity.

No: you cannot get costume and material culture wrong and still claim emotional authenticity as your defense. But the factor that makes a good event or site great is the believability of the characters, and that means more than a lecture on fine details. It means understanding the past, and even admitting what we don’t understand, and seek still to learn.

* Here’s an interesting and tough take on Cromwell’s work destroying the church.

Glaciers in the House

On March 19, 2015March 18, 2015 By kittycalashIn History, Museums6 Comments

I don’t mean the ice dams and icicles that plagued the house and streaked the service ell’s windows as they melted: I mean change.

I’m reading The Half Has Never Been Told (it kept selling out, so I only just got a copy), and thinking about the representation of a past that people would rather forget, and sometimes actively deny in the North– and the South, as you will tell from reading African-American History Fail.

Change in historic houses can be glacially-paced, as staff and docents alike resist changes to interpretation. Resistance to change is usually about comfort and confrontation, especially when the change is large.

I get that: Oh no, new stuff to learn. What was wrong with what we did before? But docents and staff get comfortable and loose sight of the context of the content they present. They say some interesting stuff.

Most jaw-dropping of all: Sometimes I like to pretend I’m Mrs Owner of the House. That one was creepy, to me. But it did give me some insight into the “ooh, wish I lived here” backwardly aspirational tour motivation.

How would you feel if living here meant you owned and traded slaves? Defended the slave trade in Congress? If a small girl had the care of your horses? We don’t ask those specific questions, but I think we need to. Slavery is slavery.

In the 1790 census of Rhode Island, there are 948 slaves, representing 1.3% of the population. That would be 13,000 people of Rhode Island’s total population today, less than the city of Central Falls (19,383 in the last census, and one of our smallest towns).

We think it’s a small number, but to those 948 people, being enslaved was everything. I don’t necessarily want to make our visitors feel personal guilt about slavery– that’s up to them–but I do want to them to think about what slavery meant, and what it did, as an economic system.

I want visitors to understand that the beauty of the house they see is built in part on the ugly and forced exploitation of a class of people. If they relate that to the rest of the world they inhabit today, even better. I think we owe at least this much to every site where enslaved people worked or lived.

Preservation or Petrification?

On November 22, 2014November 26, 2014 By kittycalashIn History, Living History, Museums, Philosophy5 Comments

For almost ten years, I’ve been working on the re-interpretation and re-presentation of the HHM that is part of my employer’s stable of properties. We’ve had mixed results: guides who refuse to look me in the face, guides who quit because a piano got moved, guides who hissed “hedonism!” at the site of a lounging mannequin, and guides who were made incredibly sad by the representation of a sick (dying) child.

James, recovering from a party the night before, angered some guides (2007)

Me, I consider all those things successes.
The people who had to deal directly with that fall out, maybe not so much.

Change is hard and scary, and every one has a different tolerance for risk. As you have probably guessed, mine’s fairly high. I blog, I go out into the world in some pretty funny clothes, and inhabit characters I am not. I expect to fail regularly: it’s a reliable way of learning.

Change is hard to maintain, it’s hard to continually evolve and push an interpretation forward. It takes time, focus, and money; it takes cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication between curators, educators, and docents or guides.

Taking risks in spaces full of very expensive furniture is particularly daunting, but especially rewarding when you see how a house looks, inhabited and, to a degree, used.

Alice receives the mantua maker's letter — They’re sitting in real, accessioned chairs. (2014)

The job of museums is to preserve, but we sometimes seem determined to petrify, to freeze a perfect moment in amber, to freeze our visitors with fear of touching, photographing, asking, and to freeze and understanding, all in a fluid world.

If we reject the beautiful and untouchable past to embrace the messy human past, we can juxtapose the fine mahogany-furnished rooms of the merchant elite with the work to create those rooms and make the picture more whole by including slaves, servants, workmen and tradesmen.

More of us would have been working than lounging (2006)

Most of us would not have lived the way the merchants did: to a degree, our historic house visits are backwardly aspirational, as we wish for nostalgia that is more false than most nostalgia.

I am not advocating favoring the smelly past, or descriptions of unpleasantness, over exultations about carvings and upholstery—except that I am—because I see these pendulum swings as a part of the process of creating more complete and honest representations and recreations of the past, in museums, at historic sites, and in living history presentations.

It’s past time for me to work again on re-imagining the house under my care: I acknowledge that. Synthesizing what I learn in living history with the work I do in museums, and vice-versa, will improve and enhance the public experience of history inside and out.

Pushing Interpretation Forward

On November 18, 2014November 18, 2014 By kittycalashIn Events, History, Living History, Museums, Philosophy, Reenacting7 Comments

Dare I say progressing?

servant mannequin in 18th century room — That’s no ghost, that’s my kid

In the past decade, museums, particularly historic house museums, have been challenged to refresh and reinvent their interpretations and presentations. The most notable challenge has come from the Anarchist Guide to Historic House Museums (AGHHM), and the Historic House Trust of New York’s executive director, Franklin Vagnone.

I re-read a number of Vagnone and Deborah Ryan’s papers recently (including this one), thinking not just about What Cheer Day in a historic house, but about reenacting, living history, and costumed interpretation.

To make a historic house museum (HHM) seem more inhabited and real takes a lot of stuff: clothes, dishes, shoes, stockings, toys— all the stuff that surrounds us now, but correct for the time of the HHM, and arranged in a plausible manner, not like a sitcom set, where chairs before a fireplace face the visitor and not the hearth.

Man with cards, glasses and pipe in 18th century room — Stuff makes a house

To a degree, this is set-dressing, but set-dressing for a still-life, or real life, if the habitation will be by costumed interpreters. It has to be accurate to be authentic, whether it’s a HHM or a living history event that is striving to create a moment, or series of moments, in time– immersive moments.

We cannot step into the past unless we believe the representation we’re seeing, and that’s true no matter where we are: that’s why fabric matters, sewing techniques matter, tent pins and kettles and canteens matter. The world is made up of tiny details that we do actually notice without even knowing it: we see more than we realize, faster than we think. We’ll trip on the different, and stop.

A variety of coats can tell a variety of stories

But what we want to do, as interpreters, is to have the visitor catch the right difference: not the one about which canteen and why, but the larger interpretive point. In one hypothetical example, wooden canteens are a way to talk about defense contracting and supplying the American army, just as over-dyed captured coats are a way to talk about the American Revolution as an international, and not just a civil, war.

An encampment is, in a way, a neighborhood of HHMs turned inside out, with each regiment a separate family within the larger neighborhood. Each regiment tells a story about itself and its history, and is a lens through which visitors see the larger story.

That’s why accuracy matters: you don’t want to debunk Ye Olde Colonial craft in camp, or cotton-poly polonaises (poly-naises?) worn by purported women on the ration: you want to focus on the larger interpretive point. When not everyone plays by the same rules, it is better to focus on your own accuracy and authenticity and to ignore Ye Olde Annoyances.

Tell the larger story, the story of your own regiment’s people: that’s your interpretive goal.

Kirsten Hammerstrom

Tag: historic interiors

Wolf Whistle

Glaciers in the House

Preservation or Petrification?

Pushing Interpretation Forward