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Die Große Stille|Into Great Silence

16 years in the waiting
By RICHARD BECK  |  March 15, 2007
3.5 3.5 Stars

VIDEO: Watch the trailer Die Große Stille|Into Great Silence

In 1984, documentary filmmaker Philip Gröning asked the Carthusian monastic order for permission to film at the Grande Chartreuse, one of the world’s most ascetic monasteries. It took 16 years for the brothers to get back to Gröning, but the wait has been worth it. Die große Stille is a luminous — no, really, you won’t believe how beautiful the light is in this film — and meditative appreciation of monastic life. Lacking both a narrator and any semblance of a story line, the episodic work is anchored only by a series of recurring Biblical quotations. It can be difficult to watch Gröning’s camera turn humble acts of devotion into performance pieces — a scene in which a monk pauses in prayer before ringing the bells at daybreak would be better if nobody saw it. But such are the limitations of the medium, and Gröning has made a transformative film that deserves far more attention than it will receive.
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