If watching monks in white hooded robes knelt down in deep contemplative prayer is your thing this is your film.
I’ve done the Carmelites (in No Greater Love) Now its the Carthusians. The strictest form of contemplative life in the Christian world. Carthusians are hard-core.
This film follows a similar template to No Greater Love. The daily doings are closely observed. The daily beings are carefully observed. All that being still. Being at prayer. Being at Bible.
It’s more beautifully filmed than No Greater Love. Attempts to be more transcendent. Time is slow motioned, stilled, distilled. As in those motes of dust falling through shards of sun light caught in corners; or the white hand towels being gently fluttered by small wind through open window; or a bead of rain hung suspended from a rim; or the steam rising from an ordinary cup of tea.; or that bowl of fruit framed like a Dutch Masters still-life.
I’m typing this as i watch. There’s time enough to type. You fill this film with your own thoughts. As a way of filling its long tracts of silence in with some kind of active engagement. (I wrote over a 1,000 words while watching!)
The Silence even when small and intimate – gets to seem full, and enriching. Silence as white as the snow falling on this Alpine mountain monastery. With a solitary bell tolling. Can’t get better silence than that. And by holding shots longer and stiller, by keeping the camera static, Gröning sanctifies the sense of time being lived consciously, as an act of consecration.
There’s no interviews with monks. Merely close ups of them stood silently to camera. A good decision not to allow them to speak, keep them nameless, anonymous. No ego can poke through then. No tiny personality to mess up the clear pure stream of silence with thick thought.
This film felt bigger than No Greater Love. I don’t question this going Into Great Silence. Silence feels beneficent, beneficial – irrespective of the religious wrappings its trapped up in. No Greater Love made me feel judgmental about the cloistered solitary life of the nuns; their justifications about why they did it, their small fallible human personalities flapped helplessly out, trying to make (no) sense of God (yer man) This film is better at revealing the sheer beauty of being – when it is simply allowed to silently be.
Into Great Silence feels less like a documentary and more like an immersive experience into the Natural world. The sounds surrounding the monastery as necessary as the silence being cultivated inwardly by the monks. Or put the other way: a natural world in which the monks co-exist as a silently occurring element. They are no more important than the rain falling, and no less necessary than the wind blowing through those white hand towels.
You could easily edit the “religious” silence out (all that monotonous chanting for example). Still leave oodles of secular silence to go around.
Silence isn’t religious. Silence isn’t Carthusian. Silence isn’t Christian. Silence isn’t Godly. Silence just is. Here with everybody. Where ever or whatever you are. That’s where this film was getting me too.
Dir:Philip Gröning, Germany/Switzerland
7.5/10
Near the end, the sound of those whooping monks on snowboards, laughing and having fun – a transmission of pure human brotherly joy!
Windows on the World 