Hilary White
A virtually silent film about silent monks in an ancient French monastery is proving a surprise hit with German audiences, the BBC reports. With no dialogue, no script or voiceover and only Gregorian chant as background music, Into Great Silence is an unusual documentary of the daily lives of the monks of Le Grande Chartreuse, the extremely remote original foundation in the French Alps, of the Catholic Church’s most rigorous religious order, the Carthusians.
The film depicting this devoted and austere life has the highly secularized German audiences spellbound and is playing to packed houses. It has hit a benchmark in Germany with over 100,000 viewers. The film was featured at Berlin’s Film Festival and was awarded the World Cinema Special Jury prize at the Sundance festival. Its European distributors are enjoying relatively high box office receipts for a documentary and by mid-January the film had grossed over 700,000 Euros.
Carthusian spirituality is a rarity even among Catholic monastics. The monks live in small cottage-like hermitages attached to each other by a cloister that leads to the monastery church. They do not talk to or interact with each other except for a brief period once a week; meals, manual labour, study and much of their prayer time is spent alone. The extreme asceticism of Carthusian spirituality has been altered very little since the order’s foundation in the 11th century.
The film’s German director, Philip Gröning, told the BBC, “When I left the monastery, I was thinking about what exactly had I lived through and it was realizing that I had had the privilege of living with a community of people who live practically without any fears.”
Gröning had to wait 17 years for permission to visit the monastery to make his film. He had been asked to wait until some of the newer monks had settled into the life of the monastery, which, he was told, took about ten years.
At 164 minutes, Into Great Silence is longer than the average film with dialogue. Commentators at the Toronto International Film Festival were surprised that it held audience attention. Sean Farnel, a reviewer for the Toronto festival wrote, “At a time in which spiritual practice is a radically variegated pursuit, these privileged observations of one of its purest forms are a balm for our bustling days.”
An interviewer asked Gröning what the most difficult part was about returning to the outside world after seven months with the Carthusians. He responded, “The main thing thathappened when I left the monastery was, having had this experience of living with people who are pretty free of fear makes you realize how fear-driven our society is.”
“We tend to say that our society is driven by consumerism or greed but it’s not true. Greed, consumerism, wanting to have a new Porsche, for example, is a disguise of pure fear. It’s a near panicking society and that was difficult to accept.”
Watch trailer for Into Great Silence. (Most of it is silent.)
- (This article courtesy of LifeSiteNews.com.)
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