A Review of "Into Great Silence"

Patrick O'Donnell sent me this review, which appeared in Santa Barbara's weekly paper, "The Independent."

The Ultimate Transport

By Special to The Independent

Originally published 12:00 p.m., March 1, 2007
Updated 03:19 p.m., March 1, 2007

An Essay on Into Great Silence

By Pico Iyer

It begins as a shock. A hooded figure is seated in the dark, so close to us he might be a piece of wood. Flames flicker here and there against a field of black. We pull back and see a figure in all white, head down, in a bare room. There’s no patter, no background music, very little movement. The camera breathes it all in in long, unswerving takes. You’ve entered another world in this silent, snowbound cluster of small cells. Each unworldly shot is a still life that says there’s still life — vibrant, shifting, human life — in this other world; the only thing that’s likely to move is you.

And very slowly, as the scenes go on — pealing bells, a monk carefully snipping some fabric, another one reading a book — you begin to see the textures in the wood, to notice the slanting of the light, to make out sunlight and birdsong as you would never do at home. The film starts to work on you — and in you, too — as its subject might. You feel a clock ticking, a bee buzzing all around you. The sound of monks gathering for prayer is thunderous. And then one of them breaks into song and the sound is ineffably sweet.

Into Great Silence (or The Great Stillness, as its title was in German) is like no other movie you’ve ever seen, though it has some of the slow attentiveness of a Terrence Malick epic, something of Andrei Tarkovsky’s uncompromising intensity. It is more a meditation than a film, really, a 162-minute observation of life in La Grande Chartreuse, a charterhouse of the Carthusian order of Catholic monks in the French Alps. There is no story, no script, and certainly very little in the way of characterization. Some viewers may run out screaming, as from a Noh drama, hungry for movement and color of a more conventional kind. Others will find it moves them as a prayer might; till a heart of stone, as the film puts it, until it becomes a heart of flesh.

The documentary, directed by Philip Gröning (who waited 16 years for a green light from the monks, and then was allowed to come in alone and live with them for several months, shooting and recording by himself with no artificial light), was called “exhilarating” by Variety, and “entrancing” by the New York Times. It won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and was nominated for a European Film Award. …

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