Figure 3: Theo Lees as the bareheaded Altarboy My practice-as-research was already demonstrating to me the fragility of the ‘fidelity model’ of authenticity when faced with the creative considerations of filmmaking. However, further decisions on costume showed how an attempt to engage with the notion of authenticity as a construction, by conforming with what Salih described as the ‘conventions of representing the past’, might also be vulnerable in the heat of preproduction. In The Burning, the central authority figure is a Protestant lay-preacher, Thomas, who leads the community’s campaign for revenge after the violent repressions of Mary Tudor’s reign. The familiar image that I wanted to engage with was that of the Puritan in sombre black clothes and white collar. I was aware that this would be historically inaccurate: later in the seventeenth century, it would become a hallmark of the Puritans, who were mostly drawn from the richer merchant classes, but in 1558 such costume would not have appeared in a small village. However, my character, Thomas, would be linked by the film’s audience with preconceived images of intransigent Puritans, and this would be an ‘authenticity effect’ that would contribute to the authentication of the historical world portrayed in The Burning. During preproduction, I volunteered to dye the wool cloth for Thomas’s costume: taking several metres of our pale cream cloth and quantities of Dylon’s black fabric dye, I followed the procedure of dyeing, which involved several hours of churning the wool to make it absorb the colour. However, the result when finished was a pale blue. I repeated the work with a fresh batch of black dye, but after many hours of churning, rinsing and drying, the wool cloth was no more than a darker shade of blue. I repeated it again, only to achieve a rich midnight blue, which was still far from my intended black. At this point, I discussed the problem with our Historical Advisor, Cathy Flower-Bond. She explained to me that my painstaking work in trying to dye cloth black was exactly the experience of sixteenth century textile artisans. There was no black dye available in that period: to achieve the colour, Tudor workers would use indigo blue and repeat the dyeing process with this colour nine times. Just as in my experience, the colour of the cloth would darken
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