I read recently that one of the golden rules of creative writing was “don’t tell the reader, show them”, meaning that explanation is patronizing and ultimately detracts from the narrative. Philip Groning might well have had this line in his head when he filmed his three-hour documentary,
Into Great Silence, about the monastery, La Grande Chartreuse, and its order of Carthusian monks.
I’m so glad he chose not to make an “explanatory” documentary – this was immersive cinema, which is exactly what it needed to be. I don’t think it could have been anything else. In that sense, it reminded me a little of
Koyanisquatsi. Put simply, it was a series of beautiful moving-photographs, capturing the natural and built environments, the rhythmic daily life of the monks, and of course the silence…
Yes, I had little idea what the chants all meant; yes, the on-screen quotes jarred occasionally (especially when they’re in French and German, thus subtitled right at the bottom of the screen in English); yes, I spent the first 30 minutes feeling acutely aware of the rustle of every single person in the sold-out cinema. Even a little explanation (a smooth voiceover by Morgan Freeman a la The March of the Penguins?) would have killed it.
What’s more, you can’t exactly rush a film that took 16 years even to get permission to make and is essentially about a life of intense, focused, reflective contemplation measured out by seasons and in rhythm to a 900 year old daily pattern. To try and fit it into a neat 120 minutes would have felt wrong. Like slow food is to McDonalds, this is to your average Hollywood blockbuster. I am also struggling to think of the last time I was in the cinema with such a respectful audience. OK, I was the youngest by about twenty years, but a less cinematic bunch I couldn’t have imagined. I reckoned everyone else there either was or wanted to be a priest or a nun…
On reflection, it would have been difficult to make a film about the life of this monastery that wasn’t beautiful. My memories of it now are only of elementary essentials: shafts of light, flickering candles, simple food, snow, sunshine, reading and writing, chants, wooden spoons, long corridors, and of course that silence…
The daily reality of the monks’ lives was to me a mix of the unexpected and to-be-expected. The unexpected? Them sliding down a snow covered hill and whooping in delight, the plastic bottles, their electric razors, feeding the cats. The expected? The monks praying, praying, and then praying some more - in the flickering light of the chapel, in their simple wooden cells, at all times of the day and through every season. And that silence…
It’s not a lifestyle that I would want to live, but it’s an incredible and privileged glimpse into a life a world away from mine. The monks’ economy of action and focus of attention is something that I envy on one level – as if everything has become so simple and so condensed and so thoughtful that nothing else matters.
To start with I felt a bit voyeuristic watching them move slowly about the monastery, but my initial worries that there were no main characters to hang 167 minutes of “action” on were put aside as, even without words, the men came to life on the screen – the young one, the ancient and stooped gardener/cook, the novice…
Towards the end, one old monk – who was blind and partially deaf – said a few simple sentences about his beliefs. One of those stuck with me: “The world has lost any sense of God. It is a pity…” And it was the one time that I wanted to speak out and break that silence…
