Into Great Silence

If you begin watching this film expecting an explanatory documentary about monastic life in La Grande Chartreuse, you may soon become bored and fed up. If you begin watching this film expecting to be taken into the monastic way of life, you will soon find yourself there. The movie takes the pace of the slow, quiet atmosphere of the monastery. Long periods of silence broken by the occasional creak of floorboards or chanting or bells, and very little dialogue. It is like each shot is a photograph. A moving photograph.

It is not entirely what one expects, however. Keep an eye out for the odd object seemingly out of place: the highlighter, the keyboard, the laptop; the odd conversation on a monk's departure for Seoul, South Korea; the shot of monks sliding down a snowy bank on their bums.

I wanted more explanation - how the individuals chose this way of life; how they sustain their community; what contact they have with secular people. But it is not that kind of documentary. As long as you're prepared for that, it is a film worth watching.

I am glad that I saw Die Grosse Stille. It was deeply touching. The silence somehow allowed one to witness the deeply private lives and experiences of these meditators. I saw this film a few days before. My girlfriend wanted dearly to see it but I had been put off by some critical comments posted on these pages. I am glad that I overcame my doubts. The views of both the inside of the monastery and the outer surroundings enhanced the feelings of the 'separateness'of the mountainside retreat. I have been a meditator for quite a few years and I lived among the Tibetan communities in India for some years. There also one can find a 'Great Stillness'. Are you prepared to set aside conventional standards and expectations of a film 'experience'? If 'yes,', then I recommend this film to you.

Very beautiful and original pictures in this movie. You can also enjoy such simple things as the sound of the snow falling or a scissors cutting a wool cloth...

In my opinion, the movie is not repetitious. I think the intention of the director is to introduce you in the monks' everyday life, and therefore you have to understand the routine and discipline they are attached to. It is just the silence that illuminates these people.

And I didn't know there were such really sweet monks in the catholic church!

At the cinema everybody were staying till the very end, although I have to say that someone was sleeping behind me ;-)

I've often pondered which sense would I rather lose: sight or hearing. I had decided sight would be the one to live without since music has the power to make me weep (often). But "Die Große Stille" has made me rethink all of that. It's a pointless game anyway, but I reexamined the importance of sound in my life versus the magnificent, ravishing images put forth in this film.

Like the works of Frederick Wiseman, it's less a work of cinema than a window that Gröning offers. We watch seemingly arbitrary action both mundane and ecstatic. We're not "told" who these people are as individuals nor why they have chosen to wall themselves off from the world's joy and suffering. But as we watch, the pace of the film is slowed so that we enter this world and test our own thoughts about human contact as well as faith. But only if you're so inclined. There's no proselytizing.

At one point late in the film one monk chides the world for living without God, and you immediately think, "How would YOU know?" And immediately we see the value of silence. In silence we don't argue or plead, complain or preach. We simply live with our thoughts, and here the brothers seem very comfortable with whatever it is they are thinking.

Through repetition and ceremony, we enter the serenity these men have found. And while there's beauty in the physical aspects of both the natural world in its changing seasons as well as the cloistered setting, it's the tranquil beauty of faces that rivet. We meet them as individuals only in a series of live portraits where their eyes stare into the lens, through the camera, and into our souls. If I didn't have my sight, I would have missed that and been lesser for it.

For me, this was an amazing experience. But for others in the theater it was tough evidenced by squirming and the occasional snore. Surprisingly, it was the younger members of the audience who seemed most entranced.

In 1984, novice filmmaker Philip Gröning asked the Carthusian monks of the Grand Chartreuse if he could film them. They said it was too soon, and thus, 16 years later, Gröning received a call: they were ready. A sublime mix of transcendence and cinéma vérité, the result, Into Great Silence, is a masterful trip inside the monastery, a 162 minute voyage that spellbinds, entrances, and makes you become one with the film itself.

Filming by himself on hi-definition video and Super 8 for only a few hours a day, using only available light and sound, Gröning was required to live and work among the monks, both observing them and becoming one with them. He structures the film in an unscathed and natural way, both accurately capturing the monks' daily routines yet also flowing by seasons. Each season has its own pleasures, which range from the playful walks of the monks in spring and summer to the moody yet harmonious mise-en-scene of the winter. Sublime to its very hushed core, Into Great Silence does take some getting used to, specifically because the monks hardly utter a word; the beginning of the film is a four minute opening shot of a monk praying in his solitary room. It is after this, however, that the film resembles true life itself: rarely have documentaries portrayed such an unhurried sense of time, yet all of the film passes faster than you wish it to, each minute counting to the very last.

Gröning's masterful shots of the Grand Chartreuse are let alone one reason that elates the film, yet more than a placed and planned camera, the shots almost resemble spying. It is undeniably true, as weird as it may sound, that the monks have gotten used to the camera. Months go on, and they blatantly ignore it, which only goes for the better. In what follows, Gröning takes us through more than just the random praying of the monks, but also of them playing (there's a scene of the monks going sledding), cooking, eating and sewing, all daily activities of the monks (excluding the playing aspect.) One need not be religious, or even agree with the existence of god and the fact of locking oneself in a monastery, to enjoy a film of this caliber. Nevertheless, Gröning has created a film of its kind: the type that will keep you thinking and enjoying its quiet pleasures—only through simple images—for a long time, yet also one that could gratify film lovers without a limit to its quiet sense of aptness.