Into Great Silence

This is a unique kind of movie. It does not ‘tell a story’ or follow the familiar style of a documentary; it presents the daily life inside a mountain monastery where silence prevails. It makes the audience identify with monastic life, almost directly capturing the mood -- no conversations, no music, and no voice over narration. Gröning called it “a monastery in celluloid.” It presents a small group of Carthusian monks living in the mountain solitude of the French Alps.

The entire movie is shot inside the Grande Chartreuse monastery where the monks live by the vows of silence, solitude and prayer. The director compresses six months of his life among the monks during 2002-03 without a crew, artificial lights or script. The core theme can be identified as ‘silence’ as a place and presence, not an absence; silence not as emptiness but as spiritual fullness.

It opens with a 5-minute shot of the alpine snow, establishing the mood and the setting.  We see hands cutting vegetables, flickering candles. Here silence is loud – you hear breathing, wind blowing, pages turning. Some images, such as an elderly blind brother feeling his way to a chapel, suggest faith without seeing and routine as anchor.

There are no clocks to mark time. Life is structured by bells for prayer seven times daily. Seasonal changes are noticeable. Sunday recreation is the only time the monks talk -- awkward, funny, and human. It shows that silence is chosen, not forced. In one scene, we see a young monk crying during prayer, demonstrating that silence doesn’t kill emotion – only reveals it. These images contrast the serenity and silence of the mountain with the rush and busyness of life below. The close-ups of a monk sewing, gardening or reading suggest attention as worship.  Repetition becomes meditation.

In the community dwelling in solitude, work done with focus is discerned as prayer, conveying the sense of transcendence in the ordinary. They barely speak, eat together on Sundays, and walk together on Mondays, highlighting the idea that in solitude one can be connected without words.

Gröning wanted to make a movie “against the dictatorship of chatter” in the era of the media. When, in 1984, the director approached the monks with the proposal for this movie, he was asked to wait 16 years. The delay was to ensure that the film-maker wasn’t after sensation.

The director’s purpose wasn’t to “convert people,” but “give space to listen”, to make the viewers confront their own noise. The film avoids interviews explaining theology, but lets the audience experience monastic time and directly encounter silence without introduction. It is not an escape from the world; there’s hard labor, cold and doubt, as one monk says: “The closer you get to God, the more you see your misery.”  The inmates pray for the world.  We are told that the monastery exists for those who do not know they need it.