Film
by Donna Bowman
America is starved for spirituality. Or so suggests the surprising arthouse popularity of a nearly wordless documentary about Carthusian monks. Into Great Silence immerses the viewer in the isolation and stillness of the Grande Chartreuse, a community of ascetics high in the French Alps. For close to three hours, director Philip Gröning follows the monks at work, at prayer and (very rarely) at play. Watching the film is as close as most of us will ever get to the contemplative life: Gröning has built an artful and often moving film almost entirely from the power of montage. But it’s doubtful that the audience that has made the film an unlikely hit is responding primarily to its cinematic qualities.
In the Western world of capitalism, consumerism and ubiquitous media, a cloistered monk is as fascinating, and as alien, as a Martian. More so, because the monk appears to live out values to which most of us pay shallow lip service: devotion to God, self-sacrifice, hard work and brotherhood. The monastery is a perverse fantasy for many who seek deeper meanings but are unwilling to give up their present ones. Just knowing that monks toil under their ancient rule reassures us that the possibility of true spirituality still exists.
It’s unfortunate that Gröning’s almost abstract film is destined—in the short run, at least—to carry so much cultural baggage. The director spent parts of an entire year, including nearly four months at one stretch, inside the austere stone compound, from the deep snows of winter through the glorious greens of summer and back into winter again. Bells call the monks to prayer, during which they sing in Gregorian plainchant. In their cells, they kneel on wooden benches, read with dictionaries at their side and copy religious texts in exacting uncial script. Food is prepared in a simple kitchen and delivered to the cells in a wooden cart. Essential labor—making robes, tending the gardens, barbering—unfolds like an eerily silent version of the way we go about these activities in “real life.”
INTO GREAT SILENCE
NR, 169 min. Opens Friday at the BelcourtTwelve times Gröning intersperses titles in French and German, quoting Christ (“Anyone who does not give up all he has cannot be my disciple”) and Jeremiah by way of Augustine (“O Lord, you have seduced me, and I have let myself be seduced”), repeating them like liturgical phrases. The images, shot in available light on Super 8 and high-definition video, often appear almost stolen. Especially striking are the sequences Gröning captures inside the church. The night offices of Matins and Lauds, shot from a distant balcony, feature the monks illuminating and extinguishing their reading lamps in almost total darkness in a seemingly random pattern. And the director humanizes the silent contemplatives with brief, charming scenes of their weekly recreation, during which they are not only allowed to speak but even to engage in impromptu sledding.
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But in a two-minute interview with a blind monk that closes the film, Gröning threatens to undo everything he has so painstakingly and beautifully accomplished. It’s as if he could not resist telling us what the monks think, although his entire method has been to simply show us what they do. No doubt the guilt-ridden American dreamers in the stadium seats soak up this holy man’s wisdom, but the glorious baptism of the film, its unadorned juxtaposition of the human and the divine, is only cheapened by Gröning’s ill-advised genuflection. Nevertheless, someday Into Great Silence will exist free of our millennial spiritual crisis. And then the stark artistry of this unadorned yet perfectly arranged document will become visible.