Hosted by Vicky Mills (producer, researcher and creative lead) with guest Lily Ford (director).

You can watch the film The Man Who Painted His House: a short film by Dr Vicky Mills and Lily Ford on YouTube.

Hello, everybody, and

welcome to this very special podcast about

a new short film titled The Man Who Painted His House.

My name is Vicky Mills, and the film is part of a wider research project that I'm doing

funded by the British Academy that explores the figure of the Victorian Art Workmen.

Those men who work for famous designers like William Morris,

but whose own work is often overlooked.

The film explores one such art workman,

a man named David Parr,

who is the man who painted his house for

reasons that will become clear during the course of this podcast.

I've made this film, which is now available to view on the Birkbeck Centre for

Nineteenth Century Studies website in collaboration with Lily Ford,

who I'm going to introduce properly in a moment.

The film is funded by the Birkbeck Research Innovation Fund

and the Boston Fund for Nineteenth Century Studies.

It's a collaboration between the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies,

the Derek Jarman Lab, and the David Parr House.

We've got two things we want to do with this podcast.

We want to introduce the film,

The Man Who Painted His House,

to a wider audience,

and we also want to discuss some of its themes.

But we also want to think about the process of

film making and how to do research through film.

Let's introduce ourselves properly.

As I said, I'm Vicky Mills and I am a Senior Lecturer in

Victorian Literature and Culture at Birkbeck University of London.

I used to work in the museum sector, and I've got related research interests in

the relationship between literature and

material culture in 19th century collecting and museums,

and as I've already said,

in the Victorian Art Workman and what that figure can reveal about

the relationship between art and labour in the second half of the 19th century.

I'm very pleased to be joined with my film collaborator Lily Ford,

who is a filmmaker.

Lily has made a number of research and documentary films and is

a founding member of the Derek Jarman Lab.

Hello, Lily.

Hello, thanks for having me, Vicky.

I guess the first thing for us to do is to

talk a bit about our film's main character if you like,

and that is this man called David Parr.

David Parr was a Victorian Art Workman

living in Cambridge in the second half of the 19th century, early 20th century.

Parr worked for a firm of art workmen called FR Lee and Sons.

As part of his work,

he actually worked for a number of

famous arts and crafts designers including William Morris and George Frederick Bodley.

But what's really extraordinary about Parr is that he managed

to buy a small, terraced house for himself and his family in the mid 1880s.

Then for the next 40 years,

he decorated this house with an extraordinary array of hand painted designs.

That house was discovered almost by chance back in 2014.

It is now a charitable trust and open as a small independent museum.

It was this house and this man and his work that I really wanted the film to capture.

One of the questions, Lily,

you asked me when we first met, I think

was why do you want to use film as part of your project?

What's the point of doing that?

This was also intriguing to me because unlike many projects I get involved with,

you were at the beginning of your research project when you thought of making

this film and you're still in some ways at the beginning of it.

Yeah, that's right. Yes. I've been thinking

about this idea of art workmanship for a couple of years,

but I'm very much at the beginning of this exploration of different art workman figures.

I really wanted to use film because I feel like a lot of research,

even research about visual culture itself,

has a tendency to start with text or everything is communicated through text.

I really wanted the film to be led by the visual and material culture

of the house and of All Saints Church in Cambridge where we also filmed.

I think film as a medium,

it's an obvious point, but it makes you put the visual first.

It makes you think through the visual rather than

through your textual analysis of something.

In terms of the film's genre,

I was very clear that I didn't want to do a straight documentary with

a lot of Talking Heads style narrated content.

I wanted the film to be a bit more poetic and creative and to

explore questions and ideas relating to the wider project.

Put that visual and material culture first and bring it into view in different ways,

which I think is what we managed to do with the film.

I was familiar with this concept of the essay film and had

been thinking about that and that's when I came to you, I think,

Lily, to help me think about

how to use film to explore the questions I wanted to explore.

Yes, and I was delighted to hear about the project and hear your objectives quite

specifically, around film and about the primacy of the visual over the text.

As someone who's come from being a scholar, moved into film,

it's been really interesting to discover with

great excitement that the additional tools that you get with film,

the multi-channel impact over writing.

That film can have its ability,

as we all know from all different media that we consume of evoking feelings and emotions.

In work that I've done before,

which is often about history and art,

where in the 19th century or the 18th century where obviously

we can't just go and find some found footage to illustrate something.

It's forced me to be quite creative about what we do find to provide the visual world,

but it has made me really interested in

the creation of a world because that's what a film is.

You create a world. I do believe strongly that a film starts and ends,

and as a viewer, you commit to watching

the whole thing to the theatrical potential of film.

The old-fashioned cinema potential of film.

But so you're inviting the viewer into a space,

you're imagining a world that might have been,

you're not saying that was definitely how things were,

and you're creating an atmosphere with which to think things through.

To come back to the essay film as you mentioned,

the wonderful thing about the essay film is that it catches all,

it can be defined in many ways,

but some useful ways to think about it are Mark Cousins,

the documentary and essay filmmaker said it's like taking an idea for a walk.

It provides a space within which to think with the viewers,

the audience about a particular thing.

You're not only evoking the world of the subject.

But you're also being open about

the fact that you don't know necessarily everything about that subject.

You're not giving people definitive answers.

You're inviting them to think about it,

to turn it over in your mind.

That space of possibility that takes us away from

straight documentary and Talking Heads is to me really exciting and

fruitful as a form of both doing

research and generating ideas

and reaching more people with your research and sharing those ideas.

Lily, would it be a good point at which to talk about some of

the themes we wanted the film to explore.

Yeah.

I guess there four key things that I imagined the film being able to

explore based on my research into

the archives and my own experience of being in the house.

The first of these was this question of time.

The house is so fascinating in the way it makes us think about time and layers of time,

and we'll perhaps talk a little bit about that.

The second theme was this question of the autonomy and agency of the art workmen,

so I really using the film to explore and showcase Parr and his work.

Linked to that was this question of the relationship between art and labour.

Parr's painstaking work, his devotion to the house,

really focusing in on making and the processes of making.

Linked to that, we talked a lot,

didn't we about pattern and how the film might be able to

capture the experience of both producing the pattern on the wall,

but also, the experience of being in the house surrounded by that pattern.

I know there's quite a lot to get to grips with there,

so I don't know, shall we start by talking about time?

Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah, I think there's

three layers of time that I like ended up thinking about as we made the film.

There's the time that has passed since Parr was doing his painting.

The fact that the house is in some ways very easily called a Time Capsule,

even though it also contains the time of his granddaughter Elsie,

who lived there for far longer than he lived there.

In fact, she lived there throughout the 20th century, didn't she?

Only died in 2013.

That is an interesting thing about the house is that it's

both Parr's walls and Elsie's teapots.

Yeah, I think that is a really interesting aspect of the house.

In that sense, there are many different

layers of time in the house as you've suggested,

and it's a material palimpsest in a way because Parr is there.

Obviously, there are traces of Elsie,

such an important figure in the caring and preserving of this house.

But Elsie doesn't erase Parr's presence.

The two exist simultaneously in

time and the film really tries to hold them both, I think.

Then of course, there's the time that in two senses is embedded on the walls.

In so far as we know from Parr's diary,

as you told me early on, he's very factual,

list chronicle of works on the house that he was working on the house for over 40 years.

That it was never finished or very rarely would he

have had the sense of it being finished every time he had a day off,

which is often only one day a week.

He would have worked six days

painting other people's stuff and then come home and painted his.

He would be working Christmas,

Easter, painter's strike of 1919.

There's the fact that the duration of

time that was invested by Parr into the house and onto those walls,

which is something we've definitely tried to evoke in the film and several passages.

Then finally, on time,

I feel like there's something more to do in a way with the theory of pattern

and why you bother painting beautiful nature inspired motifs onto your wall,

and that's something that you had already

researched and gathered loads of really interesting material,

specifically, from William Morris,

who was great at theorising pattern.

The sense that that a pattern that you see on the wall

is in a way like a crystallisation of a moment that you

remember sitting on a terrace with the shadows of

the leaves dappling over you or these moments.

Parr never expresses this, does he,

but Morris is quite good at teasing out

the broader emotional and affective qualities

of pattern and why anyone would want a pattern on that wall.

What's interesting is that you've brought up the other key player in the film,

I guess which is William Morris.

We don't get much discursive content from Parr's diaries.

They're very functional, they record his labour,

his time spent on decorating the house and doing other tasks around the house.

I think it's probably important to point out that Parr's designs are largely original.

In most cases, he is inspired by,

but he's not copying Morris's designs.

That relationship between Parr and Morris is,

of course, a central one that we explore in the film,

but it is important to unpick it a bit because the film

is really interested in showcasing Parr's autonomy and his agency.

While it's useful for us to use Morris to frame Parr's work,

it's also the case that Parr's own designs can produce meaning and create effects

without us necessarily needing Morris's accounts to access those effects.

But having said that, of course, Morris's work is

so interesting for thinking about Parr.

Cause he actually gave a talk to the Cambridge School of Art in the 1850s,

which Parr would have been way too young to have attended.

But in that address to the Cambridge School of Art.

He talks about how art needs to be a living,

this is Morris, I'm quoting now,

"A living fibre of our present days."

He writes that people producing art shouldn't want

to leave off at night and should be in a hurry to begin again in the morning.

That really makes me think of Parr and the way in which he spent

his whole working day working on other interiors,

churches, private houses, municipal buildings,

and then would come back in the evening and paint his own house.

[MUSIC]

Yes, maybe that brings us on,

Lily, to the next theme that we wanted to explore,

which is this question of the autonomy and agency of the Art Workmen.

How we could use the film to put Parr's stamp on the different work that he did.

There was a part of me when you came with this idea that

had some misgivings about how to make a film about an empty house and its walls,

because walls are two dimensional and how are they different from images.

I found a great quote recently by,

from this French critic new wave or 1970s film critic called Serge Dane,

and he says, "Cinema isn't a technique of displaying images,

it's an art of showing and showing is a gesture,

a gesture that demands looking and watching.

Without this gesture, there is just imagery."

I think that that could speak to loads of different aspects

of what we've done and how you might approach a film generally,

but specifically, to Parr and his workmanship and his craft,

I really wanted to have hands in there doing stuff.

A lot of what he did is a dead art.

It's been superseded by all kinds of technologies,

whether they were early 20th century technologies or much more recent digital ones.

For example, how would you transfer a pattern onto a wall?

You probably project it out and draw the projection.

But we were able to work with a local Cambridge artist, Mary Kempski,

to actually recreate some of those techniques that Parr used,

such as prick and pounce,

which is the method of transferring a design

from a piece of paper onto a wall that he would have used extensively.

Even though he was doing bespoke patterns

that fit perfectly in the dimensions of his rooms,

he would have transferred them,

and how he makes the paint and so on.

I think when you are making a film about any art,

it's just so powerful to actually witness those little acts of materiality and gesture,

like literal the hands movements and things.

Yeah. I would totally agree with that.

We talked a lot about how to make the film come alive through those gestures.

In that, there were certain objects that were really important

for me that I wanted the film to include,

and one of those was Parr's toolbox which is not an object that is always on view.

It's under the stairs in the house,

but we were very lucky in that we were given permission to take that out and to

handle and show different things that he used as part of his work,

both things that he used for his everyday maintenance of his own house,

but also objects that were used by him in his decoration of the houses of others,

so the gold patera, star shapes that he imitates

in his own house and a number of other objects.

That microfocus on the material culture of

making was something that we did evoke in the film.

I got myself a macro lens,

which is basically a magnifying lens,

a very close-up lens early on with this because I thought this is

how we want to suggest Parr's presence in the house

without doing a full-scale reenactment and having an actor.

Obviously, we also have Parr's voice that we might talk about later,

but I wanted that sense of humans around the edges.

You do indeed walk into the house as a museum and it

feels like someone might have just walked out of there, Parr or Elsie.

It is very much preserved in a plausible domestic setting,

sometimes a little bit like

not the most comfortable house you might want to spend your time in,

but definitely a real place and a real house.

Coming back to why I wanted a macro lens,

I wanted to crop in really close on those actions and gestures and

materials and look closely at them because the film is about looking.

Again, to come back to what it's not just a slideshow of images,

it's a mobile gaze.

It's, in a way, echoing like a scrutiny that Parr might have

been in action with his walls or with his objects.

Sometimes we're lying on the floor looking at the ceiling.

Sometimes we're looking really close,

scanning across a wall.

We're having that really close look on things.

Actually, just to come back to time,

again, one more time,

another thing that I just started doing without really knowing why or what for was

before I'd even gone to do any of

the shooting with you in Cambridge, the proper shooting.

I got the macro lens and started looking at bushes in my garden,

and thinking about time lapses.

Actually, those shots come in pretty early in

the film of just the sense of the passing of time.

It's so fundamental,

it's almost not interesting because we all know that time passes,

but there's something about film that

arrests us, we've agreed we're going to sit there and watch it,

and then this film is about, as we mentioned before,

the folding in of time, the placing of it on the wall,

the sense of posterity and yet humility.

What was Parr thinking as he was doing that decorating?

Who was it for if he didn't even have many people around because he was quite a quiet,

devoted religious, modest person?

That's the sense you get.

This gem of a creative act is also quite hidden,

and the world goes on around it.

The front door shuts and the bicycles go past,

and the people walk past on the street,

but inside is this incredible.

I think that's really interesting,

and it puts me in mind of something that I was talking to a colleague,

Claire Jones at University of Birmingham,

about in relation to the whole concept of art workmanship.

She said, and I thought this was interesting,

that there's a magical quality to it.

There's a sense that the elves have produced it and they've done it at night,

and you open the door in the morning and it's suddenly all there.

But in this case, there is only one elf and that's David Parr,

and he's done this over 40 years of hard work.

Also just picking up on what you were saying, Lily,

about that focus on making and labour.

I really like the way in which in the film,

we reference our own processes of making.

There are shots of us working with different cameras, just one or two.

We're not saturated with it,

but we do try and document the process of making the film a

little bit through the film itself.

I think showing you're working is a really interesting thing to do in film,

not pretending that you're not there,

going back to the elves, because of course the fact that

there was only one person doing all that work,

there was a family existing around him.

There was a wife who, no doubt,

would have been pulling her hair out a lot of the time and the paintbrushes in the sink,

or the fact that you couldn't go into

a room for a few weeks because something was drying.

There are these kids, his kids were young.

He was working here for 40 years,

so the whole of the life of his children,

they would have seen their father constantly working hard.

We wanted to let the people who are in the house into the film as well,

so to show architecture students working on their projects and to show that interaction.

We're not pretending that it's

David Parr's hands doing the prick and pounce and mixing the paint.

We're acknowledging that it's somebody else and we, in turn,

just as your wider project is a lot about uncovering

this hard work and creativity and value in craftsmanship that the art workman represents,

that's often overlooked and elided by the bigger names who they were working for.

I think showing that how a film is crafted,

how we're trying to tell you the story,

and what our own interactions with the house are,

like our own bodies in the frame and in the space,

it felt natural to do that.

I think that's right. I think it might be a good moment for us to talk a bit about

the voices in the film and to come back to the film's two-voiced figures,

so William Morris himself, and of course, David Parr.

We used an actor for the voice of

William Morris, didn't we, Lily?

You did a process of auditioning actors and we ended up with-

Duncan Hess.

That's right, and that worked really well.

I checked with a colleague, Michael Robertson,

who's writing a biography of William Morris as to whether he

felt the voice was a reasonable fit, and he felt that it was,

but the David Parr voice was much more of a challenge for us, wasn't it?

Because we haven't really mentioned the museum as a collaborator in this process.

Although the museum wasn't directly involved with the making of the film,

they're a key partner, in a sense,

in what we wanted to produce,

and the film needed to work for them as well as for what we wanted to do.

Very understandably, the museum was very keen to get this Parr voice right,

and we auditioned a couple of people, and it wasn't

quite what we needed, and I did some research in

the Cambridge collection in the oral history around what

a Cambridge working class accent would have been like in the early 20th century,

late 19th century, and still, we couldn't quite get it right.

Then Annabelle Campbell, who's the director of the David Parr House,

suggested that we go and talk to Terry Drake.

Terry is married to one of Elsie's daughters, Rosemary.

Terry, luckily for us,

agreed that we might go and talk to him and that he would have

a go at voicing Parr's diaries for the film.

It was fantastic.

I think Terry wasn't raring at the bit to perform anything.

I would say he would agree that he's not a natural performer,

but that actually was perfect for the character of Parr that's then

conveyed because Parr clearly wasn't chatting from

the rooftops about how wonderful he was in

the way that William Morris was very good at doing.

So to have actorly voice for William Morris and then to

have a non-actorly voice for Parr worked great for us.

The Cambridge accent seems to be

this very elusive piece that nobody in Cambridge agrees about either.

[OVERLAPPING]

That's right because it's not the same as a Fen accent.

It's quite different.

Terry is local to the Cambridge area.

What's also really interesting about him is that he was a signwriter,

that was part of his professional life,

and Frederick Leach, David Parr's boss,

his father was also a signwriter.

There was a link in that way, and it felt, in the end,

really natural to work with Terry.

Definitely. Then I think there's another voice in there in terms of the music,

which is a really important ingredient of this film which,

to be honest, we did not think would be so important when we started out on the project.

Rick Uttley, the composer,

came on board a little after we'd started putting

cuts together and making assemblies of the material.

You and I, Vicky, had already decided

that a piano would be the right sound, hadn't we?

We'd already thought that's what we want because there's a piano in the most decorated,

the most showy room of Parr's house.

There's piano music, I think,

isn't there, and Elsie played.

That felt totally right to us.

Rick is a pianist, that's his instrument,

but he suggested bringing in the viola as well,

which was a really interesting choice,

not one that we'd have ever come to as non-musicians.

But he pointed out there's

some resonances in terms of the viola being a subaltern instrument,

an instrument that's also often overlooked,

that's perhaps most valued as part of an orchestra but not really given solos very often.

I think that in Rick's work, the viola stands for Parr or almost for

the subconscious of Parr without wanting to get too Freudian about it.

The fact that there's this beautiful piano,

it's not accompaniment, piano composition,

but the viola soars in and out of that and often arcs

through these really challenging passages of music really technically difficult.

You can hear that they're difficult,

although they're very well performed.

I think that's this virtuosic performance that mirrors Parr wrestling with

his materials in limited time under relatively difficult circumstances,

which is I guess another thing that sets the art workman as separate to the artist,

conventionally, and the satisfying difficulty of doing something really well.

I think there's a really lovely mirroring and

resonance that happens with the music in terms of

Almost another voice that goes alongside the actors' voices and

Terry's voice and brings this new dynamic to the film.

We didn't have the capacity to imagine what

that music could do for the film at the start of the process,

and yet Rick's creativity has

brought the film together in ways that I think are really wonderful.

The really exciting news is that Rick is going to

come and do part 2 of this podcast where he

talks about his musical choices and his process of composing the music for the film,

what he thought about.

That will be great.

You can look forward to that, folks.

I think there's two other things we wanted to talk about, Lily.

One is our favourite moments of

the film and the other was what we've learned from the collaboration.

My favourite moment of the film is it's three sequences coming together,

and we can actually share the part of that, I think.

But it's where we go from David Parr listing

the quantity of hours that it took to paint a particular frieze in one of his rooms,

which is a stunning number of hours,

I think 85 in total,

just to paint the frieze, not the whole wall,

the frieze, the top banner that runs along the top of the wall.

We show that together with the artist's hands,

actually doing some of this painting as we referred to before,

Mary evoking some of these processes.

We see close-ups on that one on her hands,

going through the motions of some of these pieces of work.

Then we segue straight into a poem that Parr has hanging in that room,

which is called Lost, I think, Two Golden Hours,

which just, for me, really makes poignant.

This time that he's sunk into this project,

he's never going to get this time back, but for him,

there's clearly something transcendent in why he's putting this time in there.

We go from this listing of arduous processes in order to make

one part of the decoration of the room into the sense

that time passes too fast and you'll never get it back.

Then into the garden,

that for me encapsulates that there's a big,

I think, apple tree in the middle of the garden.

That was there in photographs of Parr and his family in the garden,

and it's still there now.

The seasons come and go.

The clocks, in fact, in his house have stopped.

It's a beautiful sequence that I think it really works well,

especially the way in which it speaks to that key theme that we wanted to explore,

the theme of time, but I love that sequence as well.

When you asked me to reflect on it this morning,

I actually found it really difficult to think about what my favourite moment

was because there are a lots of moments, I really love,

so I might pick two but just talk very briefly about them.

I absolutely love the sequence in All Saints' Church,

which we used a drone to produce, and it was

John Law's fantastic work with the drone camera that enabled us to swoop

up into the high parts of that glorious painted church where Parr worked with

FR Leach in the 1870s to clothe the walls and ceilings in this fantastic decoration.

We used the drone to hunt down this series of signatures up on the west wall,

including the signature of David Parr.

This was a key part of the film for me because it shows the art workman signing his work,

which was something that didn't happen really.

But filmically, I love the way that

the soaring music comes together with the rising drone and

the way that the camera pans away from

the names to the window, which is covered in cobwebs,

which again evokes questions of the passing of time.

I love the way that sequence works.

But I also love what we talked about earlier,

which is that real intense focus that you did with

your macro lenses on tiny individual objects.

I love the sequence where we look at the toolbox, I do.

That is one of my favourites as well,

along with many others.

Great. That was fun, and

of course, your beautiful hand modelling.

Yes.

Because I think just very often,

we are moved in ways we can't explain,

which makes it sound more profound than it is,

by seeing hands doing things because we can just imagine it's our hands there.

Seeing an object sitting on a table is really

different to seeing it being handled, I think.

It's great that you got permission to handle those objects,

but also just seeing how big are they compared to a hand?

What would they have felt like?

How would you have stuck that on the wall?

You picked up his back pain pills,

[LAUGHTER]

which is another important element of this whole thing.

Very important because it reminds us of the humanity of the whole thing.

The fact that this is a human being working hard and labour,

even when it's linked to art,

has an impact on the body,

and that's important for us to remember, I think.

[MUSIC]

We also wanted to reflect, Lily,

on what we've both learnt from this collaboration and from this process.

I feel I've learnt lots of things,

but one of the things is that I've really

enjoyed the way in which the film has allowed me to take

a creative approach to

my historical research and to think about it differently as a result.

I've really found that thinking creatively about

shot selection and about the juxtaposition of visuals,

how we decided together what to shoot and

how you put those shots together in your wonderful edit,

Lily, has helped me think about connections and ideas

that I might not have thought about quite in the same way otherwise.

To give one example,

the idea of uncovering the hidden history of a Victorian art workman,

the film's key idea really,

is brought into view by the literal acts of uncovering that the film

presents David Parr's signature in

All Saints' Church that we uncover through the drone footage,

his monogram hidden under the paint of the hall in the house,

his toolbox under the stairs.

Together, these filmic moments make a really powerful intervention,

I think, into that question of the agency and autonomy of the art workmen.

So making the film has really made me think about how

focusing on visual and material culture can

help us to find David Parr and to peel back the house's layers in order to do so.

Another thing that I think would be interesting to discuss is something that

connects craftsmanship with the filmic and the cinematic,

which is what often gets called production values.

I'm a big fan of quite rough and ready essay films or video essays,

that's a whole debate, what you call them,

of which are perhaps more ideas-based and have low production values in

that transitions are a bit clumsy or you've used stop

music or you're doing a voiceover that isn't perfectly recorded or whatever.

That's one end product which is also an essay film or essayistic.

But that's not what we were always headed.

We were headed towards higher production values than that,

which I think has worked out really well in that we had

some budget to pay a colour grader and a sound mixer to actually really

finesse what I had cut together and edited

and what Rick had so beautifully composed and recorded for us.

Something that I hadn't expected to happen in this process,

because I've usually worked with colour graders and sound mixers on

different kinds of projects that are more

specifically aimed at a feature-length cinema experience,

I had not expected to have an argument with you [LAUGHTER] about colour grading.

But that's what happened, which I think we should talk about.

Do you want to set the scene a little bit or to explain a bit more what I'm referring to?

Yes. I probably can't set the scene technically as well as you would.

But we filmed in the house and obviously a lot of the film

showcases the incredible designs that Parr produced on his walls and ceilings,

so we used a sliding.

A slider with the camera attached.

A slider with a camera attached, thank you,

to really try and capture that. [OVERLAPPING]

It was partly like a dynamic,

but also, close-up view of the spaces, wasn't it?

Almost like how you might walk into

the room and look around yourself or look slowly or something.

Which is difficult to do in such a small space,

which is why we used this camera with a slider and that worked really well.

By this point, we were quite far along in the process of making the film,

and I'd seen the rooms and what the pattern looked like a number of times.

Then we got the colour mixer involved,

and the film came back colour mixed.

I did have a little moment because it

suddenly felt to me that the house had gone kind of Wizard of Oz technicolour,

bright yellows, bright reds,

and the authenticity of the house was compromised.

But you had a somewhat different view, Lily.

I definitely appreciate your concern, and I do want to be responsible and true to life.

But the true to lifeness of it then becomes a bit suspended, doesn't it?

Because you make a film, some people will only ever see David Parr's house in this film.

Many people, hopefully many,

will watch it and then go and see the house or indeed, as we know already,

many people have watched the film who already were familiar with the house.

But it asks the question of the film should be as good as it can be.

The experience of watching the film, the colours popping,

that's the phrase we sometimes use, or jewel-like,

saturated, deep and pleasant colours,

that is normally what you're doing at the end of the film.

You may have used different cameras, we certainly did.

You're reconciling the colour spaces of the different cameras which can

vary from each other to make a congruent whole,

to make the whole thing seem really consistent.

The viewers shouldn't even notice that that's happened.

It just makes the film look

better and it just makes the experience of watching it better.

As does sound mixing where you bring in subtle sound effects

and ambient noise so that there's not just silence with voices and music,

all those things contribute to the viewer feeling immersed in

the space and absorbed by the content,

I suppose, by the subject of the film.

The question of how far the film should be faithful to

the slightly dingier reality of the house is an interesting one.

We resolved it to our satisfaction in that we brought

down some of those colours to be less vivid, didn't we, in the end?

We did, but for me, it was a really interesting

discussion and interesting process because it made

me try to keep my instincts as a historian

in check a bit and to let myself go a bit

and get over the fact that there might be birdsong on the film,

which didn't actually happen.

It's not true, there was no bird.

But that all adds to the creative process

into producing something that in the end is a film about art,

but is a work of art in itself, Lily.

It is. Well put.

Moving into what we've learned or the benefits of that collaboration,

for me, this project has been particularly nice in that you own the research.

We haven't done all the research as we've discussed, you've got more to do,

but you are the person who is really committed to and engaged with this,

with Parr and with the whole discourse around him.

Very specifically, you are the expert in that,

and you furnished me with everything that I needed to know and more.

I was free to have creative responses to that.

But also, my job was to think about the audience in a sense.

Your job was to think about the story that we're

telling and make sure that it's the right things that we're saying,

the right information, correct or relevant or setting the right.

That would work for the museum as well as a key partner

who will be using the film and thinking about the film.

It needed to work on all fronts, really.

Whereas I was coming from that initial problem,

although excited by your ambitions

for the film to be essayistic and poetic and artistic,

but also, the problem of,

we've got some walls,

how are we going to make something that is pleasurable,

engaging, immersive,

and somehow brings the transcendent spirit of

Parr's endeavour into our lives as casual viewers,

as viewers who might not know anything about Parr and who might not think

they were very interested in Victorian art, for example.

How do we infuse the energy and

the effort and the creativity that

was involved in that and make that real again to people,

but from the viewer's perspective,

from the experiential looking and listening place?

It's been interesting already in some of the public screenings that we've done

to listen to the responses of people to the film and to learn from that.

I found that as I continue working on the project,

that's actually been really interesting to get that response from viewers.

That's great. Just to go back to one of your original aspirations for the film,

which was to focus on the visual rather than the literary or written,

I also just love the fact that we don't know who it is when we're watching the film,

but various bodies and hands are,

as you say, literally doing some uncovering,

like lifting the rug, lifting a coat off a hanger,

off the wall to see something behind because for me,

as a historian and filmmaker,

I think the process of doing research,

of finding things out,

of going to an archive of looking at things, handling things,

being in a space is by far

the most interesting part of being a historian or

being a scholar is that process of uncovering.

I think often that's not shared enough with the public or even with students,

with people who are interested in this.

Sometimes there's a mystique about it that we magically,

by osmosis, absorb this knowledge

and then become really knowledgeable and pronounce some things.

It's all a process of investigating and uncovering that in a way, anyone can do.

Many people do family history, local history,

history that's traditionally been less valued but should not be.

Just those impulses to find out, to be curious,

to uncover, to lift and see what's behind are well reflected in the film.

That again speaks to this point about the film

being relatively near the start of my project.

Being able to use it to explore those acts of

uncovering as I develop my thinking about art workmanship,

I think it's been really valuable.

It's been a great project to work on,

and I think we'll probably wrap things up now.

Thank you so much, Lily,

for coming in and talking to me about our new film,

The Man Who Painted His House.

As I said at the start,

you can find the film on the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies website,

and you can join me and the composer of the film's original soundtrack,

Richard Uttley, for part 2 of this podcast in which we will talk about the music.