| CHARTERHOUSE BLUE : Philip Gröning's 'Into Great Silence' [5/10] |
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| Wednesday, 27 June 2007 | |
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Long since we pace this shadow'd nave; We watch those yellow tapers shine, Emblems of hope over the grave, In the high altar's depth divine; The organ carries to our ear Its accents of another sphere. Matthew Arnold, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, 1855 "The title of 2007's top-grossing doc is telling: Into Great Silence, a nearly three-hour film about Carthusian monks with no dialogue, which has grossed $666,587." So wrote Dade Hayes and Addie Morfoot in a recent issue of Variety magazine - though their intention was to highlight the fact that documentaries haven't been popular draws at the US box office this year, rather than to laud the unexpected success of such a uncommercial-sounding project. Because while the film does feature sections with spoken dialogue, they're very few and far between - unsurprising given that most of the participants have taken vows of silence (which allow for conversation only on Sundays and special religious holidays). They are residents of the Grande Chartreuse ("Great Charterhouse" in English) a large monastery - best known in the secular world for producing Chartreuse liqueurs - located over 4,000 feet above sea-level, in the Dauphine Alps not far from Grenoble. The setting is spectacular but forbidding: in 1760 one visitor wrote "One cannot conceive how it could enter into the mind of man, to establish a community in a spot so horrible and barren as this." Nevertheless, that's exactly what St Bruno - founder of the Carthusian Order - did when he built the original monastery on the site in 1084. Many of the the current structures date from the 17th century - according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, "the prior, Innocent Le Masson, began to rebuild the greater part of it in the somewhat cold and heavy style of the period. His work was solid, and there is a severe monastic element about it." Not that you'd know any of this from Into Great Silence itself - a film which is clearly intended to be similarly "heavy", "solid" and "monastic." There's no narration, and only at the very end is some basic information about the Grande Chartreuse divulged via title-cards - along with the fact that the Carthusians made Gröning wait for 16 years before granting him (unprecedented) permission to film inside their abode. While we can admire his patience and persistence, there's something slightly off-putting and (un-monkishly) show-offish about his decision to include this particular detail. Because surely it doesn't matter whether Gröning had to wait a week, a month, a year, a decade or even two - all that we're concerned about is what he did once filming got underway. His treatment of the monks and their monastery is observational, discreet, reverential, unquestioning: we see individuals in their spartan cells, and meeting together to eat, pray and chant. The seasons pass, and the monks go about their duties in an unhurried, reflective manner. The Chartreuse features few concessions to the 21st century - or even to the 20th - and it's clear that Gröning's intention is to immerse the viewer in a culture, a pace and a way of life that's likely to be utterly different from their own. But while his aims are commendable, the execution of Into Great Silence falls some way short of its potential. There are few surprises here, very little that the viewer wouldn't have known or expected beforehand, and many of the sequences are familiar from countless previous documentaries about rule-bound institutions - such as a barbershop head-shaving sequence that, with only a couple of minor changes of detail, could be taken from any cinematic chronicle of prison or military life. Gröning has a disappointingly conventional, uninspired eye for framing and composition, and an unfortunate fondness for punctuating his invariably-immaculate 35mm images with brief, rough-edged, hand-held 8mm-style interludes - an arbitrary switching between film-stocks which feels like an ill-advised attempt to gratuitously 'jazz up' the material. Taking his cue from the monks' reliance on ritual and repetition, Gröning includes ritual and repetition in his work - but rather than achieving cumulative power, these structural ploys instead come across as gimmicky and, at certain junctures, annoying. Such flaws mean that Into Great Silence makes for rather tough going at 169 minutes: there's very little that couldn't have been evoked or achieved in a more orthodox running-time, and the project exudes a whiff of being somewhat ostentatiously 'hard going.' Many viewers have, clearly, fallen under its spell: as well as its U.S. box office success (attributable partly, one suspects, to the same kinds of religiously-inclined cinemagoers who made The Passion of the Christ such a runaway hit), the film has garnered awards and critical acclaim wherever it has been shown. Perhaps it's just a question of old-fashioned subjectivity: either one is seduced and enraptured by Into Great Silence or one is simply left cold by it all, entertaining heretical dreams of popcorn fare and reflecting that, in this particular case, it's the empty vessel which is making the least noise. Fenced early in this cloistral round Of reverie, of shade, of prayer, How should we grow in other ground? How can we flower in foreign air? Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease; And leave our desert to its peace! Ibid. Neil Young 29th June, 2007 INTO GREAT SILENCE : [5/10] : Die große Stille : Germany 2005 : Philip GRÖNING : 169 mins (BBFC timing) seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Gateshead (UK), 26th June 2007 - public show (paid £6.20) |
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