Into Great Silence by the German film-maker Philip
Groening had to wait 16 years to be made. He first wrote to the
Carthusian monks at the monastery known as la Grande
Chartreuse in the French Alps, asking to film their daily
lives in 1984, but it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that
they decided they were ready for such exposure. That slowness is
reflected in the time frame of the film itself, which gradually
unfolds over more than two and a half hours but which seems even
longer because you have to look very carefully to see anything much
happening during that time — apart from the passage of the
seasons. The film begins and ends in winter, and we witness the
other seasons looking through the monastery windows, as it were, on
the magnificent Alpine landscape where nothing else human can be
seen — except for the tiny speck of a passenger jet passing
overhead in the bright blue sky.
Apart from making Robert Bresson look like Joel Silver, the
long, slow cinematic rhythms also echo those of the monastic life
being depicted. This appears framed by contrasts between the
exterior shots of nature at its most impressive and the interiors
of the monastery which are of three kinds. First, there are the
cells where the individual monks spend most of their time. These
are organized around a cloister like so many little hermitages and
look Spartan, cold, and uncomfortable. We are introduced to them in
the opening shot of a monk at his prie-dieu who interrupts his
prayers from time to time to adjust the feeble heat being given off
by the cast-iron stove in the foreground. Then there are the
barrel-vaulted cloisters down which the monks move on the way to
the chapel or along which one of them wheels his little cart with
the meals he shoves through the doors of the cells, like a prison
trusty. Finally, there is the chapel itself, which is nearly always
shot from the clerestory view — that is from high up near the
vaulted ceiling, so that the monks below who are seen praying or
holding services or, on one occasion, sleeping, are dwarfed by the
ecclesiastical edifice.
And just as they are put into perspective by the chapel, the
chapel and the rest of the monastery’s buildings are put into
perspective by the exterior shots, which are mostly of the sky or
of the mountains round about that make them look similarly small.
As with the distant airplanes swallowed up in the immensity of sky,
the human is constantly being dwarfed by the space that contains
it. Of course, the monastic vocation is also all about establishing
the right relation between exterior and interior, and the film’s
concentration on the same in cinematic terms is a powerful analogue
of this spiritual reality to which it is attempting to give
expression.
Another cinematic analogue of the monastic life comes with the
interludes of long-take closeups of the monks, who stare into the
camera in silence for what seems like an age — until it starts to
become uncomfortable to go on looking at them. Their lives of
self-examination are challenging us to examine them too — as well,
perhaps, as ourselves. Significant passages of scripture, or
devotional literature, appear and reappear in French and German on
cards which invite us to contemplate them for a moment before we go
back to pictures. There is almost no dialogue. Like the monks
themselves, we hear the human voice only in prayers, the liturgy
and the chants of the mass and, at the one meal a week taken
communally, when a monk is appointed to read from the rules of
their order.
The words, whether on the cards presented for our consideration
or the few that are spoken among the monks, become more freighted
with significance when there are so few of them. In the same way,
the silence of nature is broken only by birdsong, which thus takes
on an indescribable sweetness. Once a week, after the monks’ Sunday
dinner, they are permitted to go for a long, recreational walk, and
this is the only time they can speak to each other like normal
people — though even then they must preserve a monkish decorum
described by their rule as la grande reserve.
Similarly, the film’s own “great silence” is finally broken near
the end in a couple of shots from an ordinary, documentary-style
interview with one of the monks. He speaks of his happiness at
being brought close to God by this life — and even more by
approaching death — and he gives thanks to God for his blindness:
“I’m sure it was for the good of my soul.” There is a forbidding
distance from the world of ordinary human life in such holiness
which acts as a kind of justification for the spaciousness and
distances that Mr. Groening’s film uses to frame its portrait of
the monastic life. You may find it, as I did, very moving, but
you’ll have to be extremely patient — and quiet.
