Steve Greydanus has poured a lot of ink into a review of an obscure new movie. Sounds fascinating. Excerpt:
This back story to Into Great Silence – related in a postscript intertitle at the end of the finished film – is more than a picturesque anecdote. It is a telling insight into a world in which time is experienced very differently than in the workaday world we live in.
Like Tolkien's Ents, there's nothing “hasty” or haphazard about the Carthusians. They live deliberately, in every sense of the word, and the sixteen years Gröning spent waiting for approval to shoot in the monastery were in a way the beginning of his acclimatization to the Carthusian sensibility, and the beginning of the film's gestation period.
Gröning was admitted to the Grand Charteuse in mid-March of 2002, and shot for about four and a half months, returning for additional shooting in December and January – about six months in all. Working without a crew, he shot in high-definition digital video, operating the camera and recording the sound alone, relying only on available light. While at the monastery, the director followed their discipline of silence as well as their grueling routine of prayer and work, which never allows more than three hours of sleep at a time. (“I have to admit that I omitted the night prayers a couple of times,” Gröning has confessed.)
