‘Into Great Silence’: A Moving Cinematic Meditation
A review of ‘Into Great Silence’, directed by Philip Gröning; Zeitgeist Films, 2005.
Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ (one of my favourite songs, incidentally) deals with the inability of young people in particular to communicate with one another emotionally. The narrator has no one with whom to talk, and so the only ‘thing’ that gets him is the darkness and his own loneliness. ‘In restless dreams I walked alone,’ he says, ‘Narrow streets of cobblestone.’ ‘The flash of a neon light’ reveals a mass of people, all of whom have lost the means of connecting with one another and now seek refuge in their own darkness.
This all sounds rather melancholic; but perhaps Paul Simon understood more on instinct than he consciously knew. Such is the case with artists: often more articulate when they ‘speak’ by means of their creations than when they are asked to explain themselves. For it is only in silence that we can hear ourselves clearly, and learn cooly to observe the inner voice, to detach ourselves from it, and, in time, to let it die down so that something wiser and fresher and more authentic can emerge.
Into Great Silence, by the German filmmaker Philip Gröning, deals with the life of monks at the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. These men have taken a vow of silence. Fittingly the film has no script, no narrator. There is scarcely any dialogue. What we hear is the sound of nature—of the birds, the hills and mountains—the ancient noises of monastic life, for which time is measured in prayers and chores. Here, silence is, as it were, golden. And the grand dramas are found in the smallest of details. In the stillness and the quiet of the monastery, the monks live with a depth of experience and a strength of connection to themselves and the world that is unthinkable to most of us. ‘Listen to silence!’ urges the Sufi poet Rumi. ‘It has so much to say!’
The grand dramas are found in the smallest of details
With great care and attention, a monk mends his robe. Through the window outside, we see snow falling softly outside, dusting the hills with white powder like icing on a cake. A cat pads through the cloister, observing its human inhabitants. And so we, through the screen, see that enjoying, or rather, taking part in, the fullness and richness of reality has less to do with chasing grand and intense experiences and much more to do with cultivating a certain state of mind: disposing ourselves properly to the everyday.
Themes of time, reverence and the sublime simplicity of routine are woven through this exquisite cinematic tapestry. The film’s subjects live here, in the present, and their faces are preternaturally youthful: they seem to shine—as Moses’ did when he encountered God on Mount Sinai. For it is only when the little voice in our head falls silent that we understand that our ceaseless commentary on events amounts to a barrier that stands between us and the totality of everything—what Michael Oakeshott simply called ‘experience’. We are liable to impose ourselves on everything in a way that children, in their innocence, do not. For us, gaze is almost never, ever ‘cleansed’, to use Huxley’s famous phrasing. We think we know it all. And we don’t. And we don’t precisely because no two moments are the same. We never, ever ‘step into the same river twice’. For we are not the same person. And it is not, per Heraclitus, the same river.
Gröning gives us a taste of this: a taste of life stripped to its essence. A monk at the Grand Chartreuse monastery wears the same clothes as his brothers, crop his hair the same way they do, does the same chores that they carry out, and speaks little or not at all. He has, in sum, by choice, next to no agency. Thus his ‘self’—his ego, if you prefer—is very small. He does not stand in his own way. And so he is very deeply tied both to the essence of what he is and to what is around him. He is bound to everything.
Gröning gives us a taste of this: a taste of life stripped to its essence.
I am much, much too worldly for such a life. I like rich, fruity, velvety red wine; hearty peasant food; beautiful clothes; old buildings; long, meandering conversations with my endlessly fascinating friends. I like my cats. I love the view from the terrace in the morning. I am also quite fond of my wife. Given my long and rich and varied history of making unfathomably stupid mistakes, I am very content with where I have ended up. Still, I can understand the appeal of the monastic life: the simplicity, the peace, the intense feeling of connection with the world … After all—and not to be to earnest about things, reader—connection is what ‘it’ is all about, as much as we laud individuality and authenticity and all the rest of it, as if madly trying to persuade ourselves we are happy atoms when the all the evidence says otherwise. Iain McGilchrist (I am sorry to mention him so often) says that over his decades of intense study across many fields and at the very highest levels of academia, what has emerged is that the human being needs three things to find her life meaningful: to be part of a cohesive social group with whose members she can share her life; to feel some kind of connection with the natural world; and to have some sense of the sacred, even if that does not necessarily amount to membership of a religion. I watch Into Great Silence and I think: these guys have nailed it.
And yet Gröning, naturally, faces the challenge of rendering such abstractions in such a way that they engage us. It is tricky to sell a film that is about the daily life of a cloister of Carthusian monks, more so when they refuse to speak. But he succeeds. He really succeeds. The cinematography is stark and spare, and yet beautiful in its rawness and simplicity. The film follows no structure, allowing events to unfold without the insistence of a plot. The shots are long. The editing is deliberate. A lesser hand might have made this an endurance test for his viewer or—worse—chloroform on film. Instead, he created art. There are no tricks here: no flourishes that would distract from the subject. There is no score, only the ambient sounds of monastic life — footsteps, a creaking door, the distant tolling of a bell. The camera barely moves. The stillness of the monks’ lives are the focal point, the everything. Slow down, it seems to say. See the world as they do. See it anew, every moment. Contemplate.
But perhaps it isn’t for you. It is long—nearly three hours—and, as I have suggested, slow. If Marvel is more your thing, reader, then I am not sure this will be your cup of tea. But if you are willing to put the time aside, to give yourself over to this film, I promise you that it will be a rare and profound experience. It captures something that is so important: that real peace, and real clarity, can only be found when all the noise around us fades away, and all the sounds within us cease. Into Great Silence leaves an impression, that echoes in our memory like an ancient prayer repeated down the ages.
