National Catholic Reporter (April 6, 2007), pp. 15-16.
In February of 1999, I started to research An Infinity of Little Hours, a book about the life of Carthusian hermit monks. That same year, the Reverend Father of the Grande Chartreuse, the headquarters of the order in France, called Philip Gröning to ask him to film a documentary on the same subject. (Mr. Gröning had proposed the project in 1984.) In 2006, Mr. Gröning released Into Great Silence, capturing the life of the Carthusian monk in images. I like to think that An Infinity of Little Hours provides the libretto for Mr. Gröning’s music of Carthusian life.
In 1084, St. Bruno initiated an order of hermits who lived in community. He was serious about the hermit part. While not exactly unfriendly, these hermits do not have hospitality or public relations on their agenda. Historically, the order is so protective of its privacy that it is even averse to canonizing its members; in the eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV commented, "The Carthusians prefer to make saints rather than to reveal to the world the saintliness of the lives of the Order." Their standard response to visitors is to momentarily slide back the grill in their entrance door, saying: "we do not allow visitors." The Carthusian order has been so reclusive that few people, even the most devout Catholics, have heard of them.
Last February, Mr. Gröning and I had a chance to compare notes about these hermit monks. When Mr. Gröning started shooting in 2000, the Reverend Father looked at him and said, "we are starting a risky thing." Mr. Gröning felt intimidated when he first entered the cloister; he was afraid that he couldn’t possibly capture the Carthusian life. But, while making the film, he lived the life of a monk for five months, following the same regimen as any new recruit to the order. He went to church, took care of his garden, cleaned his clothes, went on the weekly walk, and did all the other monk jobs.
Although Carthusian monks are only allowed to talk twice a week, he became close friends with them. "They let me know they liked me by smiles and other non-verbal gestures." And, of course, on the weekly walk, he could talk to them. Several times in the film, Mr. Gröning’s camera zeros in for perhaps twenty-second portraits of individual monks. The eyes of the monks tell the story; I was especially intrigued by the monk who didn’t blink. These portraits are so intimate that they seem, to me, an invasion of privacy of these very reclusive men. Yet Mr. Gröning assured me that, "There was complete trust between the monks and myself. I do not feel that their privacy was invaded. I would leave a note and ask if I could take a portrait at a specific time." In one shot, a monk conspiratorially glances toward the camera with a slight smile.
Mr. Gröning uses no narrative, no explanatory voiceover, and about two minutes of dialogue. Because Mr. Gröning decided not to comment during this "silent" film, the viewer hears the sounds of the cook chopping celery, the elderly gardener digging a Spring garden (groaning with the exertion), the monks sawing wood for their stoves, wooden spoons clanking against metal bowls, scissors cutting into new fabric, and the eternal rustling of pages. Underneath these sounds, the viewer senses a palpable silence.
The Reverend Father did not allow Mr. Gröning to use artificial lights, so the film alternates between barely-seen candlelight images and clear shots, such as pages of Gregorian chant scrolling across the screen or sharp images of the Grande Chartreuse itself. Scenes of normal human life, monks eating in their cells, getting their heads shaved, feeding cats, and even cows going through the cloister, are mixed with very arcane scenes: for example, an eerie shot of the monks praying Night Office in a dark church during the middle of the night. To remind the viewer of the present time, Mr. Gröning twice shows an airplane flying above the Charterhouse (a Carthusian monastery)—by this time, I was so immersed in the film that I thought the plane could be a bird. In another scene, Mr. Gröning shows a noisy group of teenagers outside the Charterhouse trying to see what goes on inside. When Mr. Gröning worried that he didn’t have enough scenes, "a shot would be right there in front of me."
Using captions and subtitles, Mr. Gröning repeats verses from the Bible throughout the film, particularly the verse, "Oh Lord, you have seduced me, and I was seduced." The repetition suggests the timelessness of the monks’ lives and the tranquility in their portraits. Only once, near the end of the film, does a monk address the camera directly. Mr. Gröning chose a very elderly, blind monk who wears a hearing aid—instead of a stove, the alert viewer will see a radiator in his cell (to prevent a fire?). Mr. Gröning says he chose the monk, not because he was blind, but because his face looks so happy in spite of his handicaps:
One should have no fear of death. On the contrary, it is a great joy to find a Father once again . . . In God there is no past. Solely the present prevails. And when God sees us He always sees our entire life. And because He is an infinitely good being He eternally seeks our well-being. Therefore there is no cause for worry.
The blind monk epitomizes the meaning of the Charterhouse.
Mr. Gröning’s film does not does not have a beginning, middle, or end. The monk lives outside of time, and Into Great Silence is timeless. The first time I saw the film, I was uncomfortable, wondering what was going on, but by the second viewing, I settled back to simply absorb the images, much as I would listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach. By the time I watched the film for the fifth time, I knew that Into Great Silence had become part of my life. Time cycles around the monks and the viewer: we see the heavy snows of the French Alps engulfing the Charterhouse, a glorious image of crocuses emerging from the snow, the lush greenery of summer, then back to the scenes of falling snow.
The result is a stunning immersion in Carthusian life. Mr. Gröning refers to himself as a documentary filmmaker, but above all, he is an artist. Into Great Silence, in a sense, is a series of stills skillfully placed, rather than a film as we think of the medium. Mr. Gröning did not want to create a documentary of the monastery, he "wanted to create the monastery." "I wanted the film to become a monastery." And it does.
To return to my initial question, why now? In his splendid New York Times review, A. O. Scott comments that Mr. Gröning is not interested in the history of the order, nor in why men come or leave; he is not concerned with the biography of the men. Fortuitously, or perhaps providentially, I focused on the men who lived in the Charterhouse. Who were they? What did they feel? What did they think? Who stays? Who leaves? And why? In Mr. Gröning’s words, An Infinity of Little Hours (also 2006) "is a thorough view into the hopes, struggles and beliefs of novices entering a charterhouse . . . a voyage through words, taking the reader to where my film may take the viewer through images and time." The combination of the two works gives us for the first time in nearly one thousand years a look inside an obscure world—formerly known only to those who had lived there.
Again, why now? In the early 1500s, there were 195 Charterhouses in the world. In 1999, twelve monks lived at Parkminster, an English Charterhouse built to accommodate one hundred monks. Before the Reformation, Carthusians were well-known; since then, they have become nearly invisible. Outsiders are rarely allowed into the Charterhouse and never inside the hermits’ cells, two-story individual dwellings. Even consultants, such as theologians, psychiatrists, or doctors, are not allowed to live "in cell." This has been a sine qua non of the order—no one but potential recruits can live in cell. Yet Mr. Gröning lived in cell. In a conversation with him, the Reverend Father referred to the Carthusian mission as that of a lighthouse. In a similar vein, Søren Kirkengard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, said:
Of this there is no doubt, our age and Protestants in general may need the monastery again, or wish it were there. The "monastery" is an essential dialectical element in Christianity. We therefore need it out there like a navigational Buoy at sea in order to see where we are, even though I myself would not enter it. But if there really if true Christianity in every generation, there must also be individuals who have this need.
John Morrill, a Cambridge historian, commented: "An Infinity of Little Hours will make most readers recognize the empty plenty with which we crowd our own lives." With sympathy, the blind monk says, "It is a pity that the world has lost all sense of God."
Another way of looking at "why now"? is St. Bruno’s reason for seeking solitude. Weary of the corruption in the Catholic Church of his time, he decided to find a way to go directly to God. Perhaps we also want a less institutional, more direct way to God, some inner space, some quiet. After years of watching terrorist atrocities on television, we need a safe place. When I left Parkminster for the first time, I sensed that something was missing in the Charterhouse. Then I realized that I had been missing anxiety. Mr.Gröning had the same experience at the Grande Chartreuse. The monks have no fear. Mr. Gröning hopes that his audience "will realize that this way of life exists and perhaps part of it can be applied outside the monastery."
Filming Into Great Silence gave Mr. Gröning more trust that things would go the right way. He no longer likes to listen to music and does not watch television, but he says he didn’t watch television much before. At the end of my interview, I asked, "What question haven’t I asked that you would like to answer." He responded, "There is no question that I haven’t been asked about this film."
A. O. Scott in the New York Times hesitates to call Into Great Silence "one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as an antidote to all of the others." I agree. The film is addictive—each time I watch it, I know that I will need to watch it again, to return to life in the Charterhouse.
