Starring: Carthusian Monks of the Great Charterhouse
Director: Philip Groning
Rated:
No script, no dialogue, no plot, no actors anyone would know, no commentary, no coarse language – let alone sexual references or nudity and, on the face of it, no action.
What’s left to make a film with?
Well, what’s left is a “silent movie” as they used call them, but recently made and defiantly using the very word in the title: “Into Great Silence”.
The result is a unique cinematic experience.
It is two and a half hours of life inside “La Grande Chartreuse” – the Great Charterhouse in the Alps outside Grenoble – where St Bruno founded the Carthusians in 1084.
Carthusian monks are vowed to the strictest silence, and live in individual cells spending hours each day in mental prayer and working. They meet up to chant the Divine Office and for the Conventual Mass, but they do dine together on Feast Days. Their life is one of the most severe simplicity and asceticism.
So this is a film directly challenging all the expectations of the modern movie-goer. It makes no concessions, much as the monks themselves are resolute and totally devoted to their search for union with God.
There is no commentary chattily telling us, “Look what Gervais is doing! He used to be a Lieutenant in the French Army, serving with UN peace-keeping forces in Africa. Now he seeks a different peace, “not as the world gives”, but as Christ himself gives”. There is not a word of explanation of their lifestyle, let alone promotional passages declaring for instance that the life portrayed on the screen is an ideal refuge for the casualties of the frenetic activism of modern life; or that it points the way for all of us to the ultimate and inevitable detachment from the things of this world as we near our Maker.
The film does no more nor less than show the monks going about their daily business. It is for us to pose the questions, which must spring to mind from the very first shot. Why do they do it?
Each of us, grappling with the problems of earning a living, raising a family, battling ill health perhaps, but all battling the spiritual crisis of our age, will come to a personal perception of what those monks are doing, in pursuit of an other-worldly goal.
So in this film, instead of advertisements breaking the continuity, there are Gospel texts posted on the screen from time to time, bearing Our Lord’s words that have drawn men to him for 2000 years: “Unless a man…” “Blessed is the man….” That is how silent films used convey dialogue.
Rising above the demands of the flesh and the clamour of the world, the Carthusians soar to a plane of human existence we may not be called to, but which we are compelled to respect, one that demonstrates the existence of spiritual life while still we are in the body, a movement of the spirit which we must all in the end undergo…
In these days the proportion of aged people is growing, as is the increase in the number of shut-ins. Their life is not all that different from that of these Carthusians and could lie ahead of any one of us, except that the monks have deliberately chosen it as a more direct way to God.
Once the film establishes the pattern of life in the monastery, the monks are introduced to us one by one in a series of mug-shots of the monks. How these demonstrate their humanity and their individuality!
Phillip Groning, the Austrian who conceived and made the film, took many many years to persuade the Abbot to agree to the project. Thank God he succeeded.
Don’t miss it.
