Into Great Silence

 I was very taken in 2007 with the release of Die Grosse Stille / Into Great Silence, Philip Gröning’s film about daily life in a Carthusian monastery located in the French Alps. I have put it in the avant-garde section of this website, because it is more than a documentary, and shows (to my mind) the unexpected influence of Stan Brakhage and of Warhol’s film portraits, as well as of German mountain films, and makes brilliant use of the creative mixing of what we see with what we hear. So this essay is in praise of a remarkable achievement and compares it (favourably) with Zidane, the avant-garde film about the great French footballer, Zinédine Zidane, released about the same time.
 
Click here for a 6-page pdf entitled ‘Monks thump 7 past Zidane’.

Laborare est orare or 'To work is to pray': a monk mending a shoe in Into Great Silence