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.

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 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.

A sensitive and deeply moving film. We follow the life in silence of the monks in the Grande Chartreuse Monastery in the French Alps. Only once a week are the monks aloud to talk when they go for a walk in the woods or glide in the snow during winter. The photography is magnificent as the camera respectfully observes the monks quiet life of prayer and daily tasks. At certain intervals we see close-up of the monks whose faces impact us by simply being present. During two hours we become part of the monastery, the routines and the beauty of the mountains that surround us. After seeing fifty films at the Sundance Film Festival, this is the film that has stayed with me. The filmmaker waited 16 years before he got permission to shoot in the monastery and it was well worth waiting.

If you can sit still for the nearly three hours of this film, it's almost guaranteed to bring down your heart rate, maybe make you want to spend more time in the high mountains or in the snow or contemplating spring flowers in some isolated place. Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille) is a documentary of unusual austerity and beauty, like La Grande Chartreuse itself, the Carthusian order's central monastery high in the French Alps that German filmmaker Philip Gröning has recorded. His film is steeped in a unique atmosphere; there is no narration. To have provided any would have interrupted the prevailing silence that is characteristic of the place. This method -- the withholding of all commentary -- can work fine for a documentary, especially where there is a lot of dialogue, as in the recent, highly admired Iraq in Fragments; or where the activities shown are familiar, such as the classroom scenes so meticulously filmed in Être et avoir (To Be and to Have), an un-narrated chronicle of a rural French elementary school. But lovely and calming as Into Great Silence is, it preserves the atmosphere at the cost of failing to penetrate its subjects' inner lives. How well can we ever understand spirituality? But above all, how well can we understand it from visuals, without any words describing the inner experience?

There are other specifics that Gröning, who was forced to work virtually alone and without any artificial light, chooses not to detail. A monk's life is rigorously organized, but here that schedule isn't specified. Editing flits about arbitrarily between shots of monks praying alone or in the chapel, external landscape shots; shots of wood being chopped, food being prepared or delivered to cells, snow being shoveled, robes being made, heads being shaved, books being read at cell desks. And there's an initiation ritual, plain chants, poetically blurry close-ups of candle flames or fruit. There's even a moment of laughter and high spirits when a group of younger monks slide down a hillside in the snow (in their boots, without skis or snowboards). Bells sound, and the monks bustle about from one activity to another, but according to what system is left to the imagination. In one shot a monk sits in front of a big desk strewn with bills and documents. He just stares at them. What does it mean? Several times the succession of scenes is interrupted with a short series of shots of individual monks staring into the camera, wordlessly, of course. There is one long shot of a monk who may be dying. He too stares into the camera. These moments are rather spooky. Despite the presence of prescription eyeglasses, shoe goo, electricity for lights and an electric razor in the "Razora" room -- even, despite wood stoves in the cells, the sighting of a single radiator -- the place has a thoroughly medieval feel, and that's spooky too. Every so often in large letters there is a saying of Jesus, such as "He among you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple," flashed in French on the screen, as in a silent film, and these are repeated, randomly. But again, is this randomness appropriate in depicting a life that is anything but haphazard in its structure?

After an hour the film shows that the monks, though they lead daily lives that are silent and isolated except for chapel services, do also get together on Sundays for a communal meal followed by a walk and a chat, rain or shine. When given this opportunity, they don't analyze the world situation. They discuss minutiae of the order's regulations. Later, a blind old monk with impressive down-drooping eyebrows is the only one to address the camera directly. He speaks of blindness and death, describing both as welcome gifts from God, one received, another still to come.

There is a significant omission. This place, begun in the early eleventh century, rebuilt in the seventeenth, produces a famous liqueur whose sale supports it; but we don't see the monks doing this work. Gröning says the process is too complicated and would distract from the rest. Distract from what? From the effect he wants to create; not from a picture of what the place is about.

Gröning underlines the uniquely rare opportunity he's sharing with us by explaining at the end that he asked for permission to film in 1984, but was held off from doing so till 2000. Maybe he thought since he had to wait so long, he should make a long film. But the extra time doesn't mean deeper insight. At most it is the prolongation of a mood. Rather it seems an outgrowth of the random editing system, an unwillingness or inability to cut or to organize. Off-putting and tight-lipped though this film is, it will no doubt stand as one of the more distinctive of recent documentaries. But it inspires as much irritation as reverence. It's not utterly clear that Gröning is the ultimate guide to this world -- or to any world, for that matter.

There are many paradoxes and ambiguities in a monastic existence. The Carthusian order is austere. Its life is one of renunciation and penitence. In this austerity there is a certain luxury. The monks choose it willingly. If they can stick with it (many apparently don't), it is what they want, an ideal setting for the uninterrupted contemplation of God. And it is a peaceful life, a safe life, a life cut off from the worries of cities and families and all uncertainty. Monks don't prepare their weekday meals in their cells any more; they're brought on a cart. Bare and spare and strict though it is, La Grande Chartreuse is in some sense the most spectacular of grand hotels.