THE POWER OF SILENCE
July 2010
Who would have thought that films about the cloistered life should be all the rage? Or, if that is an exaggeration, at least that there is a significant audience of a kind for them? A year or two back, in Die Grosse Stille/Into Great Silence (2006), Philip Gröning made a 2¾-hour monument documenting life in La Grande Chartreuse, the Carthusian monastery in the French Alps; then in 2009 the Edinburgh Festival not only showed Tacita Dean’s Presentation Sisters about the five elderly residents of a Cork convent, but also Michael Whyte’s No Greater Love about the Carmelite nuns of the monastery of the Most Holy Trinity, tucked away in the Notting Hill area of London. Coincidentally there has just appeared a new fiction film set in a nunnery, The Calling.
Is it obvious what the fact of these films being made is telling us? That they chime with a renewed interest in the rigours of life in a religious community? (Christian that is – we await a documentary in the same vein about life in a Buddhist monastery.) It is tempting to make a sweeping conclusion that, even as distrust in the church as an institution continues to bubble away in people, the spiritual life, if it is felt to be ‘genuinely’ spiritual, calls them away from the banality of their humdrum lives.
Put the fiction film, The Calling, on one side. Whatever its merits, or the merits for that matter of forerunners such as Les Anges de Péché (1943), Bresson’s religiously steamy fiction about the Dominican Sisters of Bethany, Black Narcissus (1946), Powell & Pressburger’s erotically steamy drama set in a convent in the Himalayas, Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), Rivette’s La Religieuse (1966), Ken Russell’s campily steamy The Devils (1971), and so on, all of which may offer us insights into human psychology (and indeed specifically female psychology since monks seem largely not to have come under the knife), yet we miss for the most part an illumination of the nature of the spiritual calling: what drew these people to the religious life in the first place? To answer that question the documentary film is much better placed, distilling hours of patient observation in a way that makes the temporal element manageable for a secular audience used to crowded hours and multi-tasking. There might be a grand narrative about a backlash against the abusive portraits of enclosed communities painted in the fiction films I’ve listed, but I don’t really think so. I believe the answer to be a disappointingly technical one: it is the arrival of digital technology that has made the big difference. This can be illustrated with reference to another documentary about monastic life, Frederick Wiseman’s Essene about a Benedictine community in
As Gröning did with Into Great Silence, Whyte found himself with a mass of material which has been edited down to 105 minutes. The film is beautifully structured, with the rituals of Holy Week forming a central episode of the film, with a straight transition from the Easter vigil to the sight of a dead nun lying in her coffin. After her funeral and burial, the film reasserts the daily rituals that provide stability and continuity from year to year, and very near the end, we see the profession of a new nun into the order. Since a sound tactic in documentaries is to spring surprises, the next thing we watch is her participation in a Scottish reel performed during one of the nuns’ recreation times.
From these films, as opposed to the fictional features, we get a much better sense of the way religious communities engage with ritual, whether it be liturgical or manual, or the rituals of study or even the rituals of relaxation, in order to shape a life in the service of God. They shift the emphasis from speaking to not speaking, although ‘not speaking’ should be understood as including praying, singing, worshipping and studying. Michael Whyte thought the monastery of the Most Holy Trinity was plain as a building, but that the costumes lent themselves to ‘Vermeer-like interiors’, and for much of his film the human figure is central to the composition of the images. Into Great Silence similarly likes to dwell on figures in interiors but it is also different because Gröning exults in the mountain scenery surrounding the Carthusian monastery and in the still life of objects. The length of the two films point up another difference: No Greater Love is 105 minutes, Into Great Silence 162 minutes. Whyte did not show the nuns engaged in reading, commenting that silent prayer looked like ‘the sister was having a nap’. Gröning had no such scruples: his film starts with a monk on his knees at prayer to the sound of flames burning wood in the stove. Outside it is snowing, and Gröning films the flakes falling on his lens, and then we see the building emerging from the lifting fog followed by some close-ups of the snow-covered buildings; at the end of the sequence we are granted a view of the whole magnificent monastic range in its alpine setting. Right from the start he wants to say that this is a film about time, and that monastic time is not our time – hence the length of the film. The difference is palpable: Whyte calls himself a low-church Anglican who is ‘emotionally spiritual’, and his engagement with the sisters is a very warm one. Gröning on the other hand seems like an unabashed Catholic (I speculate here, but that is certainly the impression the film gives), fully persuaded from the outset of the virtues of the monastic vocation.
Yet it may in fact be the case that both film-makers entered these cloistered spaces uncertain what to expect, and indeed their films are the better for it. They seek to show, not to preach: the goods are laid out on a stall for us to admire. Both films engage, in so far as they were allowed to, with the monks and nuns as individuals, and we get some insight into their motivation. Notably, Into Great Silence contains an interview with an elderly blind monk in which he articulates his blindness as a divine gift, and how he serves in a monastery as an expression of his love for God. Although the prioress in No Greater Love takes a more intellectual tack, she is no less rigorous. She comments, ‘Even if the atheists are right, I’ve lost nothing by this life of devotion. But otherwise, I’ve gained a welcome in heaven on my death.’ This sentiment, which is based on Pascal’s Wager, his blindside argument for the existence of God, chimes in with a Jansenist crucifix we are shown, which shows Jesus’ arms not stretched out wide on the cross – as if to embrace us - but instead stretched above his head – as if to lead us upwards. Now Jansenism was the context in which Blaise Pascal exercised his theological imagination, and it is worth pointing out that the headquarters of this austere movement was the nunnery of
These documentaries may be seeking to reassert this truth. Even more striking is the fact that in an age of sexual permissiveness, when gossip about the private lives of public figures – whether film stars, footballers, politicians, whoever – is a staple fare of the media, there should be an audience for films about the celibate life, as if to turn the world on its head: abandon ‘If there is no sex, it is not interesting’ and embrace instead ‘It is interesting because there is no sex’.
For more on Into Great Silence, go to http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk/avant_garde/into_great_silence/
© Tim Cawkwell / July 2010