Director: Philip Gröning. Writer: Philip Gröning. Cinematography: Philip Gröning. Film editing: Philip Gröning. Music: Michael Busch, Philip Gröning. Producers: Philip Gröning, Elda Guidinetti, Andres Pfäffli, Michael Weber. With: Monks of La Grande Chartreuse monastery at Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse in Isère, France. France/Switzerland/Germany. In French/German/Latin. 167 min. Original title: Die Große Stille. 2005.
Documentary. A full sixteen years after Gröning asked for permission to make a nonfiction portrait of La Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, the monks granted his request. The result is a masterwork of phenomenological film unlike anything else in cinema. Gröning not only depicts the look, sound, and atmosphere of the Charterhouse, as Carthusian monasteries are called, in stunningly vivid and intimate terms; his exquisitely subtle imagemaking captures the sacredness of its moods, the textures of its light and shade, and, above everything, the almost physical quality that time itself acquires in a place where religious ritual, quotidian regularity, stasis of the body, and inwardness of the mind have reigned for centuries. Although he might easily have structured the film around the initiatory experiences of two novices whose induction we see in an early sequence, Gröning has chosen to avoid any kind of drama or quasi-narrative development, imbuing his account with a purity of spirit that, in a profound cinematic paradox, further enhances its sustained investment in the bedrock materiality of the perceptible world upon which the film (like all films) and its subjects (like all corporeal beings) are necessarily grounded. Shot in the famously austere cloister on high-definition video, supplemented by Super-8 and 35mm material, the film achieves a match of content, style, and spirit that’s close to perfect; this extends even to its intertitles, some of which periodically recur in identical form, taking on new meanings with each appearance while mirroring the hourly, daily, and seasonal cycles that define the tempos and rhythms of monastery life. This is one of the rare movies that must be seen to be believed.
-- David Sterritt
