I recently watched Into Great Silence with a couple of friends, and have to say that this is one of my favorite meditative movies of all time. I guess that’s kind of funny to say though, considering there really aren’t many meditative type movies. Some movies, I think work the emotional side enough to produce a kind of introspective mindframe, but none go quite this deep in actually promoting a mindful attention. My man Roger Ebert captures it in his review of the film:
We get a lot of movies about noise these days: gunshots, screams, explosions, fist thunks, thunderous roars, revving engines, squealing tires and those deafening sonic swooshes that accompany nearly every corporate logo before the feature even gets started. But we don’t experience many moments of silence at the movies (and I’m not just talking about the audiences). “Into Great Silence,” though devoid of narration, musical score or much at all in the way of dialogue, encourages us to listen closely: to the sound of snow falling in the mountains, a nocturnal prayer whispered in a small wooden cell with a knocking tin stove, a bell rope pulled in a chapel. Nobody yells. Nothing detonates.
The images also open up to us gradually and quietly. We’re not bombarded with fusillades of shots: “Look at this! Now this! Now this!” “Into Great Silence” unfolds with its own gentle, unforced rhythms, designed, as German filmmaker Philip Groning has said, to be less a “documentary” than a meditation.
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/antmoose
A great movie!!! Though I did find a dimension missing, namely the experiential dynamism so typical for more advanced contemplative stages, that would illustrate to the audience how the monks themselves experience what they regard “the situation”. A dynamism, I would argue, going quite beyond conventional notions of silent vs. noisy, slow vs. fast etc. The slowing down, and the hypnotic repetition of weather, rituals and motions, and the daily schedule, so well presented in the movie, along with prevailing silence, is characteristic for only some, namely intermediate, phases in contemplative life, after the subsiding of withdrawal symptoms. But then, such an “insider” movie would inadequately portray the silent character of exteranl observances. In this way, the innocent watcher/bystander gets introduced into the great silence. A fantastic feat, in itself. Plus, I don’t know if reviews mention it, but there’s no soundtrack in the film, another worthy accomplishment, the silence being the soundtrack. Anyhow, I greatly enjoyed it. Thanks for the reminder.
Godspeed,
Hokai
Thanks for the reference. I just ordered it through netflix.