Beyond the Multiplex

"Into Great Silence": Time, space, light, mountains, prayer. Repeat
There was a woman sitting near me who I believe was driven mad at the New York press screening of "Into Great Silence." Maybe 20 minutes into Philip Gröning's long, slow non-narrative drift through the isolated life of the Grand Chartreuse monastery, she started to check her cellphone. At first she'd flick it open, gaze at its reassuring glow for a few seconds, then close it again. As the seasons began to shift in the French Alps, and Gröning's Carthusian monks followed their silent daily rituals of work, prayer and contemplation from frozen winter into spring warmth, she grew even more restless.

She bounced from leg to leg, kicked the seat in front of her absently, drummed her fingers on her skull. The gaps between cellphone communions grew shorter: every five minutes, then every three. At last, maybe halfway through the film, she just opened the phone up inside her bag -- perhaps unaware that her rustling, snuffling, clicking sounds had the effect of a herd of bison in a dead-quiet theater -- and sat there staring at it. She stuck with that tactic for a while, as if her talisman of the oh-so-urgent LED-lit outside world might enable her to tolerate life in the monastery, before finally getting up, amid heavy sighs of exasperation, and leaving.

I was delighted to see her leave, but I also feel some sympathy for her predicament. "Into Great Silence" is a long, slow movie, and to appreciate it you have to battle boredom -- an underappreciated phenomenon in our society -- and get to the other side of it. I'm sure the messages she was retrieving were irresistible matters of money or love. But if she really wanted to make it all the way through this film, her strategy was flawed. Gröning's film asks you to do, in miniature, the same thing that the Carthusians ask their novices to do: Give up the outside world. That's a devilishly difficult thing to manage, at first, but a delightful release once accomplished.

Drawn from 120 hours of digital video footage Gröning shot over six months in Grand Chartreuse, "Into Great Silence" is a rapturous, absorbing experience -- it has no voice-over, no back story or history, no archival footage and no talking heads -- but only if you can surrender yourself to it. It isn't just that checking the time or reading your e-mails is missing the point, and interferes with your appreciation of the film. As a practical matter, it's pointless and agonizing: Oh, good! Only 97 minutes to go! It makes the film seem much longer, and difficult to take, than it needs to be. If you allow the world of the Carthusians to become yours as far as possible, allow your mind to whirl in whatever eddies it wants to while they pray and garden and mend and pray and eat, the film washes past you like stream water. When it actually ended, I was quite surprised: I was just getting comfortable.

There are several ascetic orders of Roman Catholic monks, but the Carthusians -- makers of the famed Chartreuse liqueur -- may be the most demanding. Total silence is maintained for six and a half days a week; on Monday afternoons the monks socialize with explosive vigor, debating community issues, playing giddy games or tobogganing snowy slopes like so many 12-year-old boys. The rest of the time, life in Grand Chartreuse has varied little since the order was founded in the 11th century. Monks sleep in two three-hour stretches, interrupted by midnight prayers. They grow herbs, feed animals, meditate silently and live in voluntary poverty, recycling and reusing every scrap of fabric or consumer item they acquire.

There's very little dogma in "Into Great Silence," and where it does appear -- as in an interview with an older monk about destiny and death -- I found it frankly disagreeable. Of course the Carthusians are specifically Christian and Catholic, and it would be dishonest to portray them as anything else. But what Gröning captures so beautifully is the essence of monastic life as an ancient quest for self-knowledge (and knowledge of whatever is Out There) that transcends all such strictures. This is a remarkable work of pure documentary cinema, and a mystical accomplishment on the order of Wagner's "Parsifal" or Tarkovsky's "The Sacrifice." That's hardly anybody's thing these days -- it's not often mine. But the effort, in this case, is worth it.

"Into Great Silence" is now playing at Film Forum in New York. It opens March 9 in Los Angeles; March 16 in Boston and San Francisco; March 23 in Kansas City and Washington; March 30 in Minneapolis and Seattle; April 6 in Chicago, Dallas, Portland, Ore., and San Diego; and April 27 in Atlanta and Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.

Fast forward: Look back at Anger; "The Cats of Mirikitani"
Kenneth Anger is probably better known as the author of the barbed (and entirely non-fictional) atrocity catalog "Hollywood Babylon" than as the director of "Scorpio Rising" and other semi-experimental films that were years, even decades, ahead of their time. That's why "The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volume One," just released on DVD, is such an essential document. This lavishly packaged set comes with an affectionate introduction by Martin Scorsese, who's been much in the news lately. It's a long, long way from a homoerotic dream film like Anger's visionary 1947 "Fireworks" to "Raging Bull," let alone "The Departed," but if you squint you can see the lines of connection.

Anger not only invented "queer cinema" many years before the world was ready for it, he also combined pop music and the symbology of classic Hollywood with a film vocabulary drawn from European surrealism and modernism. You could argue that almost all post-1970s cinema flowed from that combination. Even in unpolished and unfinished works like "Puce Moment" or "Rabbit's Moon" -- both fragments of longer films that were never completed -- Anger's images are arresting, and his ability to create something like a plot out of abstract elements is strikingly contemporary. This essential disc concludes with Anger's first successful effort to make a longer film, the hallucinatory 1954 "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome," a key influence on the work of David Lynch, John Waters, R.W. Fassbinder and others.

This week also brings us "The Cats of Mirikitani," a haphazard but heartwarming documentary by Linda Hattendorf that tells the extraordinary story of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, an aging, eccentric Manhattan street artist whom Hattendorf took in during the post-9/11 chaos. As she gets to know Jimmy better, his history becomes stranger and stranger: He's a Japanese-American who was interned during World War II and forced to renounce his U.S. citizenship. Living on the run and under the radar ever since, he had never learned that all such renunciations were later deemed null and void. Jimmy's a crotchety, angry character -- and who could blame him? -- but in the end "The Cats of Mirikitani" is an irresistible fable of reconciliation and forgiveness. (Opens March 2 at Cinema Village in New York; other cities may follow.)

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)