Our first impressions after watching the movie "Into Great Silence" was admiration and at the same time astonishment of the film's dissimilarity to everything we've seen on screen so far, but it wasn't boundless admiration.
Ewa had a lot of reservations about the film's editing, and I thought director Philip Gröning didn't quite understand what was the main idea of the movie.
When it comes to the film's editing, the ending seemed like a fiasco to us. After the story of a blind monk, excellent as the end of the film, the face of the dying monk appears on the screen, then the face of the novice, followed by repeated images from the beginning of the film; the close up of the monk's face during prayer, snow falling on the lens, and finally a great close–up of burning logs.
We thought that these "ornaments" unnecessarily added to the story of a blind man devastate the crystal of perfection of the culminating point. What he says are the only words spoken directly to the camera, to the viewer, the only explanation of religious philosophy, the only loud, living word in the film. This balanced the weight of the great silence in the film. So why include additional images?
I couldn't understand what Gröning wanted to show. Was it a panorama of the monks' life or a record of his impressions from his stay in the monastery?
Why is there nothing about the order of religious life in the film?
Why do we not know whether lunch or dinner is served?
Why don't we know what time exactly the prayers take place at night?
For whom the bell tolls? Does everyone who comes to the chapel pull a rope just because it hangs there?
Why is cutting material for the monk's frock suddenly interrupted by night prayers?
Is not obtrusive and exhausting the red light of a burning lamp shown over and over?
Why do the sequences of "cutscenes" such as snow, forest, patches of light on the floor, shadows on furniture, last unbearably long?
Why aren't the started sequences of events going to the their natural end?
We don't know what dish the monks cooked from chopped vegetables.
We don't know if the lobby clock has been repaired.
We don't know where the monks are going down the corridor.
What happens in the room they enter?
If it was supposed to be a panorama of the monks' life, the film was poorly made and, in addition, excessively long in time. The whole thing could be said without losing the beauty of the film in less than two hours. So what is the movie about?
I went to bed with these thoughts. Just before falling asleep, something dawned in my head. The present. It fits well. But who said that? In what book did I read it? Suddenly I had a brainwave – the blind friar said so!
He not only told about death and unnecessary fear of it. He also said that the future and the past are concepts invented by people. It's just a human condition. However, it is completely different with God. He sees everything as a whole, as one, and all human life for Him exists as the present only.
The present – a thing that cannot be grasped by people. We only stay in it, that's true, but we can't say how long the present moment is, because it always escapes into the past or into the future.
Divine thing – the present.
Thus, Gröning in his film intended to show us THE PRESENT.
The present as permanently continuous.
The present which is constant existence.
As a consequence - Gröning completely gave up the tool of time. He did the editing of the filmed material in such a way that the passage of time did not matter at all. He wanted us to see, or rather experience, existence that does not happen in time, but is and lasts; because time is not needed for anything to exist.
There is prayer, there is work, there is a procession, there is some season of the year, there is snow, there is a green forest, there is a book, dinner, reading, cut apple, open drawer, it is night and day, there is light, old age, youth, there is the sound of the bell.
There is also a red lamp flame. For us it means eternity. But it's not about eternity as infinite time, it is about eternity as being now. Eternity is. Neither endless nor started. It is now.
The film is not intended to illustrate abstract concepts, it is not intended to illustrate philosophical concepts – it is to introduce us to a present, that is, in a state incomprehensible to humans.
I don't think the director wants to show whether this religious or philosophical postulate is fulfilled in the order. Maybe he wants to show us how people take this postulate as a measure of themselves and their existence, in what scenery and milieu they do it, and whether it is possible to fulfill. Maybe – because I think that Gröning's ambitions were at the higher level – to show the incomprehensible, to show something that we cannot understand.
Many times in the film you see on the screen text about abandoning everything you have as a human being for God's service. It is not about completely giving up goods, riches, passions, ambitions, desires, or giving up a family. It is about abandoning ideas – seemingly inseparable from humans' existence – about our being: that it passes, that it cannot be separated from time, that humans consist of their past and of their projection into the future; that humans can only exist as a part of a specific community, specific history, tradition. All these things in a present have no meaning. They take on meaning when we use the tool of time.
There is a fundamental separation of WHAT the film shows and HOW it intends to show. How - means the artistic demand for the shape of a work, which, although it is a film, must act as a kaleidoscope, in which we see different parts as one system, as one shape of seemingly separated pieces of one Present.
The film is to lead the viewer into a present created for his eyes. The point is not for the viewer to see what is going on in the Carthusian order, but how the order exists in Great Silence and in Great Now.
That's why we see how the monks are in the same way both day and night, in prayer and cutting wood, they are in winter and summer, they are in the snowy garden and in procession, they are when the bell rings and when they unfold the book. And do they manage to give up everything human and really devote themselves to the service of God?
Did the director manage to artistically present the present with the help of a camera and editing? Did we, the viewers, experience it, even visually, even during the screening? It would no longer be naivety, but a sinful usurpation of monks, photographer and viewers to believe that these intentions were realized.
We see one monk so immersed in prayer, that we think he has fallen asleep. But when the camera shows his hand, you can see that his fingers are changing the rosary beads. And rosary beads, or the minutes marked on the clock face, are no different. The director turns out to be helpless, because his camera records movement, just as helpless is man – even when he tries to transcend his state, the only thing he achieves is to devote himself to this attempt.
You cannot stop being human. You cannot turn off the tape advance, delete the sequence of events, and continue filming. You cannot enter a present when looking at the screen.
What guarantee do we finally have that a blind monk told us who God really is? He told us what he thinks about God and according to which laws he tries to give himself to Him. He said how he believes – he and the other Carthusians.
We don't see in the film the clock routine of the Carthusian monastery. Gröning wants to avoid, as much as possible, any time stamp. This leads to paradoxical complications. Time does not actually flow in the film narrative, but it seems to flow in the frames of the film. After the scissors work on a new frocks for monks, we suddenly find ourselves in prayer at night, but in a moment we see a finished frock, tried on by a novice. We see as a story, filmed in real time some scenes of play in the snow – going out, climbing, sliding on the snow. We see the ceremony of admitting two novices to the order. We see once and again a haircut of regrowing hair. The sequence of cleaning the patch in the snowy garden ends with the gardener choosing seeds for future plants. We see snow melting in spring. We see that monks do not necessarily give in to the sentences of a timeless present – one of them has a pacemaker sewn under the skin.
However, all the events that take place over time do not form a chronological tale. Nothing happens yesterday, today, a week ago, just in the morning, just at noon. We are told about a world whose elements exist in a unique (though only in film) NOW.
From this point of view, images repeated several times showing the accelerated movement of stars in the firmament are extremely significant. You can see how the constellations in the evening and night sky flow quickly over the valley of the monastery. This is the most cinematic sign of the passage of time, even trivial, and you might think what it really means is that time is passing. But if you look at these constellations more closely, you can see that the camera is never aimed only at the sky. We see the flow of distant stars always against the background of the hills surrounding the valley. Actually in the gap between the rocks we watch just a patch of the sky. We observe, therefore, not how the stars flow, which is known to be an illusion, but what is really happening in space – how our planet flows through the abyss, how our home wanders through huge immeasurable spaces.
This image, therefore, does not mean the flow of time. It means the secret of our journey with the Earth, perhaps a journey to God. Such is the constant NOW not only of humans' world, but of surrounding immensity. Perhaps.
So what about the unfortunate culminating point that is missing at the end of the movie? In a traditional documentary film one would rightly expect it.
With the concept of showing The Present things are different. The Present does not require any final point. There is no such thing as an effective end of The Present.
The last film sequences are almost exact replica of the initial ones. Now the whole story could start again. As a result, it is difficult to say whether we saw the end of the film at the beginning or the beginning at the end. It looks as if both the story of the film and the viewer are stuck in a timeless moment.
But this is not true, because only silence does not need time to exist.
Bronek Kowalski
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originally in Polish in 2006