Related
Translate
Previous entry: David Yonggi Cho’s Leadership Challenged
Next entry: Muslim presence in Mississippi growing
Advertisements *
Elsewhere
Get RNB via RSS
 |
RNB's RSS feed What is this? |
Get RNB via Email
 |
 Subscribe by Email What is this? |
Follow: Twitter
Most Popular
This Week:
- Guyana’s Jonestown suicide site gets plaque
- Scientology practices ‘putting people at risk’
- Recession: Muslim schools in UK under threat of closure
- Australian senator tells Parliament of widespread criminal conduct within the Church of Scientology
- World’s oldest ocean-going passenger ship, ministry ship Doulos, to stop sailing
- When a child dies, faith is no defense
- Israel Charges Extremist With Attempted Murder Of Messianic Family
- Scientology’s feet held to the fire in Australia: Struggle between a church and the state
- 1-year prison term for man who participated in cyber attack on Church of Scientology Web sites
- Australian police take up complaints about Scientology
Germans flock to see silent monks
More articles on this topic: Carthusian Monks / Cathusian NunsAn unlikely film has been filling cinemas in Germany in recent weeks: a three-hour documentary with hardly a single spoken word, set in a monastery.
The film Into Great Silence is an intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks high in a remote corner of the French Alps.
It came about 17 years after the director first requested permission to make it.
At the monastery, only the candles break the darkness.
It is the middle of the night and in the icy cold of their stone cloister, the monks sit in their thick habits reciting Gregorian verse.
“I think they simply do it because they choose to… become close to God,” says the film’s director Philip Groening.
“It’s a very simple concept, the concept is God himself, is pure happiness, the closer you move to that, the happier you are.”
Repetitive lives
He first requested to film in the remote monastery of Grande Chartreuse 17 years ago. When he finally got in, he found a regimented world that is largely unchanged since the founding of the Carthusian Order 10 centuries ago.
The monks have avowed almost total silence, interrupted only by what one of them called “the terror of the bell”.
“Once you accept the fact that when the bell rings – you just don’t think about it – you just get up and go and do whatever that bell requires you to do, then, every moment that you have is a pretty permanently present moment,” he says.
“You don’t have to sort of plan, like ‘What do I do in two years?… Where do I want my career to be in 15 years?’ And the absence of language makes something – the moment itself becomes very, very strong.”
The film tracks the infinitely repeated routines of the monastery. In one scene, a monk bathed in shadow delivers lunch through hatches in the cell doors.
Cinema hit
The cameraman then goes inside where the monks sleep on straw beds, with only a tin stove for heating. Outside, the snow-swept scenery of the French Alps provides a majestic backdrop.
Groening lived here for several months to make the film.
“When I left the monastery, I was thinking about what exactly had I lived through and it was realising that I had had the privilege of living with a community of people who live practically without any fears,” he said.
“They have the feeling that death is just a transition, they have the feeling that if something goes wrong, then it’s OK because it’s something that God wanted and this is something that changed me.”
The Carthusians are the strictest Christian order and this three-hour, almost totally silent film about them, was not expected to be a hit. But it is playing to packed cinemas, fascinating audiences with the unique glimpse of a contemplative life, unknown beyond the monastery walls.
What You Can Do From Here
|
Read More Articles On These Topics
Share, Blog About, Bookmark, or Email This Article
Subscribe
Read Another Article
Previous entry: David Yonggi Cho’s Leadership Challenged Next entry: Muslim presence in Mississippi growing
RNB Homepage with latest headlinesFind Related Information
Find Related Books
|
Share This Article
To share this page simply copy and paste one of these URL's:
