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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 20, 2006
A truth exposed
A film with no script, no dialogue, and a soundtrack entirely in Gregorian chant, has been playing to packed houses in Germany, and now across Europe. A feature-length documentary, it has no interviews, no narrator, no background material. Entitled Die Grosse Stille -- Into Great Silence -- it is about the life of the monks in Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian monastic order.It was made by Philip Groening, who won the trust of the order’s General Prior. The filmmaker was working from a treatment first projected 22 years ago, which was never revised. With no team, he lived in a cell, assuming the life of a monk himself, participating in all unskilled work, and himself observing the silences to the point where he found the rubbing of fabric in his jacket unbearably loud. He did his shooting at various times in 2002 and 2003, under execrable lighting conditions, determined to achieve “the most absolute congruence between content and form”. Ninety minutes of the film depict only the monastery’s buildings and setting; captions confirm the repetition of prayer and psalm; the chant was recorded on up to eight tracks to ensure precision. In his remarks on the film’s website, Mr Groening explains that he had originally meant to make a film about time, which is too easily overlaid by language and narrative. The Grande Chartreuse was the means. It evolved into the end. Time is experienced through the passage of seasons, and the rhythm in a liturgy that aspires to be rigid. The monks live to contemplate God, in separate cells -- lives so carefully scheduled and ruled that they have little opportunity to “be themselves” or “be social”. Their sleep is interrupted by the night prayers. Necessary communication is done through notes dropped in a box like mail; work routines arranged so the monks may ignore one another. (They are farmers and craftsmen; they make their famous liqueur.) They live in chastity, and strict poverty, every habit carefully made from patches of conserved cloth; every button recycled when a monk dies; and every centime of surplus monastic income given away at year’s end, to prevent accumulation of riches. Mr Groening was familiar also with Cistercians and Trappists. He observes of the Carthusians that, “every one of them is a forceful individual”. The emptiest individual cell proclaims this. The order has no difficulty in attracting novices, most of whom leave or are sent away. Those who outlast the novitiate, stay an average of 65 years. This first "charterhouse" (the English name for a Carthusian monastery), in the mountains of the French alps between Grenoble and Chambéry, has been in existence for a thousand years, has survived eight great fires and burial in an avalanche, revolutions and wars; yet the view from inside is that, should it cease, then it will cease, according to God’s will. What most interested me, and the person who brought the film to my attention, was a single remark of the filmmaker, about what he had learned from making his documentary. He told the BBC, “When I left the monastery, I was thinking about what exactly had I lived through and it was realizing that I had had the privilege of living with a community of people who live practically without any fears.” And again: “We tend to say that our society is driven by consumerism or greed but it’s not true. Greed, consumerism, wanting to have a new Porsche, for example, is a disguise of pure fear. It’s a near panicking society and that was difficult to accept.” This is why the film plays to packed houses. It speaks to people about what they are. I think Mr Groening has astutely diagnosed not merely what is wrong today, with post-Christian Europe and by extension all the West, but why we are due for a terrible tribulation. One that began to unfold in the events of 9/11, and now begins to take a shape in the ludicrous battle over Danish cartoons. Emerging from a fog, our fears resolve into something we can look at. We cling to things that cannot last, out of our curious panic; to things like Porsches, and the nanny state. We ignore, in this panic, anything that isn’t hard to the touch -- the verities of God, nature, and our nature. Yet in so doing we select what is transient, over what is eternal. Pain, loss, disappointment, and death, we cannot escape. Each is written unalterably into our fate, as living organisms. But our fear is not so written. It has instead been brought upon ourselves. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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