Into Great Silence

I went to see Into Great Silence yesterday. It's the documentary a German man made about the six months he spent with the notably ascetic Carthusian monastic order at the Grande Chartreuse monastery. The film as artistic as you can hope for. Philip Gröning, the films creator, does an incredible job of blending artistic ambient shots with clear, sober shots of the French Alps and the Grande Chartreuse monastery where the movie was filmed. Though, to be honest, I think it would be incredibly difficult to find a bad shot, considering the beauty of the countryside and the buildings within the monastery. I think the technical and artistic merits of the film are reinforced by the fact that Gröning was the only person allowed in the monastery to film, and with no artificial lighting. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Lars.

The feel of the movie reminded me of The Mountain Record by Yuichiro Fujimoto (listen here on a French LiveJournal site, and if you're as enamored as I was, purchase it here ). Its natural sounds, and its attention to the banal and pedestrian, both aurally and visually, evoke the rough, beautiful life of the monks. In that way it's also thematically reminiscent of John Cage's 4'33", reminding me of the importance of silence and the beauty in the stillness of small moments.

The difficulty of the film is that three hours of seemingly arbitrary footage was hard to sit through. I consider myself a patient person. I meditate daily, I play poker, I watch a lot of foreign and independent movies. These are tedious and time consuming tasks that require great focus and patience and still I was squirming through the last hour. Part of what contributed to my discomfort was Gröning's reluctance to establish a narrative of any kind. It's difficult to tell what kind of footage he had to work with, and therefore hard to know how much room he had to maneuver, but because he settles for character sketches in place of even the semblance of narrative the film often feels its three hours.

There are some genuinely beautiful moments in the film, where Gröning clearly captures the difficulty and allure of monastic life. As well there are moments of intimacy unlike any I have ever seen on film. His 30 second portraits of a 15 of the monks are beautiful and tender in a way that impressed me. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie is the story behind it, told on the film's website: "In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning wrote to the Carthusian order for permission to make a documentary about them. They said they would get back to him. Sixteen years later, they were ready." But that tidbit is little consolation for sitting through the three hours of beautiful, but tedious filmmaking.