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
