Enjoy the Silence

I'm a sucker for films that are: (1) foreign; (2) long; (3) boring. That said, I got the trifecta with Philip Groening's 2006 film, Die Große Stille (Into Great Silence). It's a nearly three-hour long documentary about a Carthusian monastery in France: there's no narrative and very little dialogue. Groening was given extensive access to the monastery and the result is a kind of poem-film of one striking image after another. Paradoxically, the images are almost all banal: the camera hones in on the monks preparing a meal, or turning the page of a hymnal, or shuffling along to mass. But each is invested with a kind of spiritual significance and Groening admirably finds the poetry in the ordinary activities that for the monks constitute a kind of worship in their own right.