Last weekend, I travelled down to Bath to film some of the events at the Jane Austen Festival. We had booked an apartment in the Circus at the top of the City, just around the corner from the Royal Crescent - It turned out that the house in which we stayed had once belonged to William Gladstone and was next door to Gainsborough’s house. I was impressed.
The Jane Austen Festival runs annually and is the culmination for many of a Georgian Festival season of promenading through various towns and cities. It was quite a spectacle. On Saturday morning, 700 people dressed as Georgians congregated in the private gardens across from the Royal Crescent. 700 people dressed as Georgians made quite a visual impact. I filmed them as they walked down through the City into the Promenade Gardens near Pulteney Bridge. Filming 700 Georgians in Bath, I felt like I was filming a period drama - and watching people chatting and laughing and surreptitiously looking each other up and down - made me think that the human state doesn’t really change - this is probably just what the Georgians would have been doing! The only difference was that many of these Georgians had mobile phones. To begin with I found myself wondering why on earth people dress up in period costume and promenade about the place… However, after a while I found that I had stopped intellectualising the situation in front of me, and just enjoyed watching 700 people (and 1000s more around them who were non-Georgians) just enjoying themselves.
After the promenade, I walked back up home with three Georgian friends. The locals of Bath must be fairly used to seeing Georgians walking through their town. We walked through Paperchase and the staff hardly flinched. However, our journey home took ages whilst my Georgian friends posed for photographs with tourists from all over the world.
I am pleased with the film I made - it just tells the story of a day in Bath and I think that is what my job of filmmaker is.
