“The film should become a monastery…”

By Angela Zito

Tiny bottle of Chartreuse in hand, I emerged in mid-town a few weeks ago from watching Into Great Silence, my promised dinner date long-gone. The two-hour documentary about a monastery that I’d thought I was going to see had morphed into an amazing three-hour experience of silent imagery. Groening’s documentary (he hates the term) of life among the Roman Catholic monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps opens this week at the Film Forum in New York city, its U.S. theatrical debut. (Visit their site for Zeitgeist Film’strailer )

Groening requested permission to shoot in 1984. Sixteen years later they got back to him, inviting him to come on in. He did so alone, managing the camera-work and sound as a one-man filmmaking team while keeping the rules of work and silence of the monastery. Their conditions of no artificial light, no additional music, no commentaries, fulfilled exactly Groening’s own initial treatment. The Order of the Carthusians, founded in 1084, supports itself on its green, herbal liqueur so it can devote the lives of its monks and nuns to perpetual, contemplative silence—they live alone together, each in a cell (really a suite of several rooms, with a tiny garden) meeting only for regular prayer vigils. The resulting film, a mix of HD video and super-8 film, is so exquisite and so surprising that critics rave while viewers return as often as they can during its European runs.

Groening, 48, was born in Dusseldorf. He studied medicine and psychology for three years while working in film before turning completely to his life’s work. Into Great Silence is his sixth film and won the Sundance Special Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary last year, along with four prizes so far in Europe. In a noisy world, full of information, he is after some other effect: The few voices we get in the film are not so much heard as overheard, when Groening follows the monks on their weekly hike together off the monastery grounds together. Sound thus takes on a different quality, it communicates, but not through language—instead there are rustlings and bells, and birdsong.

The film hovers at the edge, on the one hand, of representing a world, and on the other, of abstracting its colors, sounds and feeling tones into new forms that we can experience freshly, with no reference but our perceptions. Wide shots of the monastic setting in snow or blooming trees, of monk’s at work or prayer, alternate with close-ups of fabric on flesh, fruit afire with morning light on a bare wood table that are painterly in their impact. Into Great Silencerearranges reality so that we can find something new in ourselves, and reminds me of the work of Nathaniel Dorsky. Dorsky’s small masterpiece, Devotional Cinema addresses film itselfas “the spirit or experience of religion…where film itself became the place of experience and an invocation of something meaningfully human.”

When I talked with Philip Groening a few weeks ago in New York, he explained that he “didn’t want to shoot a film that informs people about a monastery, but a film that transforms into a monastery. The film should become a monastery.”

Following is our conversation, which took place on February 6, 2007, in Washington Square.

BEING ALONE

AZ: The monks refused you permission to shoot this film, then later granted it–What did that 16 year time-lag mean for the film?

PG: I wanted to go into a silent monastery, re-centering and a re-encountering my Catholic background ,which I was fighting. I thought I might see something of the pure center of that religion instead of the very pragmatic and very social version in the everyday church. By the time they called me in 99, I thought a lot of whether or not I still wanted to do it, whether it still fit into my life. I took out the outline again and it’s like five pages of a perfect concept. I thought OK, if it seems so perfect 15 years later, there is something to this.

But it was actually lucky—all the technical stuff I used to shoot the film did not exist in ‘84, so in ‘84 this film was basically impossible. I had been in a monastery in the south of France with a friend, one more luminous than the Grand Chartreuse, because it was much smaller and less constructed as a castle. We were thinking about shooting there on 16mm B&W but I doubt that we could have done it because there was just not enough light, and I certainly could not have done it alone .

AZ: Why?

PG: To go back to the basic concept: It was to go there, go through certain experiences, to have my perception, my senses, altered by what I encounter, use those altered senses, the altered sense of rhythm, of hearing, of seeing as a tool for creating something that really filters this altered perception into the audience, and opens up the space for them. So in order to do that you have to live there, for at least three months.

But they are hermits, hermits who live in a community. If you go there as two people, you are already a group. And if you have those moments of despair, those moments of really falling into the Nothing—which are usually the moments before you then suddenly find an image of extreme beauty—you would always find a reason to go to the other one and ask him if he also had problems. And you would just not pass through those things, get to the other side of them. You would not find those images of pure presence.

AZ: That sense of aloneness….

PG: It’s very important that they are actually alone and that you do not go in with a group of two or three outsiders. In a monk’s cell, nobody goes. Only the prior and the master of novices. Nobody else—they don’t visit each other in the cells. That’s a very intimate room. Filming somebody in that intimate room when he prays, if you would be two it would already be totally impossible—such an intrusion—it would be the classic destroying of what you want to film by setting up for filming it.

THIS IS NOT INFORMATION

AZ: My own experience of viewing your film felt like you transformed time through repetition and juxtaposition of people and things. The moment when I wept in the film was towards the end when you took objects into the lens as portraits. You had shot the monks in silent close-up and then, suddenly, I realized that the fruit was being framed in the same way. I got the sense that the shooting must have been wonderful. But what about editing?

PG: Editing was a complete nightmare. I am still recovering. It was 2 ½ years, with no interruption, to find that structure—where the film transforms for you, and things happen, like you start to cry when you see certain objects. I knew I wanted to get there. But I’ve never seen a film that gets there. So there was no example to follow at all. Me and my advising editor—every time we applied rational rules…the film just totally fell apart.

AZ: Like what kinds of rules?

PG: Like why don’t we put the African monks coming into the order earlier? Or, when which caption appears. In a version just before the Venice Biennale, a caption explaining that the Carthusians are very strict, and that I applied in ’84, and that they answered in ‘99 . was put right at the beginning, and it just wiped out the film.

AZ: Why?

PG: Everybody knows it a documentary, and it’s about a monastery. Everybody knows in a documentary, usually you get information. If you give a little bit too much, add some little scene about what really happens when they take in a novice, you start setting up that desire—or even certainty— of the viewer. Once you give him that caption, the viewer says “OK this is a documentary; he’s playing a game now; its twenty minutes, there’s no new information, there’s going to be new information.” But there’s never any new “information”, and it just collapses. This was so incredibly difficult.

AZ: If you let audiences go down the track of “This is a documentary and I’m getting information” that’s it…?

PG: Then you’re lost, completely lost. Of course I shot lots of stuff about where they produce that liqueur—people always ask, Why didn’t you show that? But it’s so complicated how they produce it, you would either have to enter into language or unresolved puzzles, and this would give the liqueur extreme importance, something like a magical symbol.

AZ: They gave out the little bottles of Chartreuse at the advance screening in NY and I thought — this is so perfect. This is how to introduce the liqueuer: not in the film, but bottled, so you can have a drink after the three-hour experience…

PG: The liquor is what they ‘re famous for, but for them it’s not so important. For the DVD I did an additional thing about the fabrication. It’s very funny, because I ask the monk in charge: What’s the significance of the liquor for you? And he thinks… “Uh, the significance of the liquor for us…? Hmmm well, it’s something that makes the money we need.” It’s not a magical thing.

AZ: What is most important to you about film as a medium?

PG: I always wanted to do this film because only cinema completely controls the time of the audience, no other medium can do that. It is the medium that comes closest to what religious rituals are. So I had the confidence even in 1984, although no camera in the world could have filmed at night then, that you can transform cinema into a monastery. Because all religion, by structuring time, can open up spaces in the viewer or in the participant. And this is exactly what you can do in a cinema. If you dare to do it, if you throw away all the additional construction and the supposedly helpful things like ”follow one person.” It’s not about following another person. Then you don’t think about yourself. It’s just a waste of time.

AZ: It’s information?

PG: It’s information. And getting information is not the same as encountering yourself. Nobody goes to a monastery to become a specialist in monasteries—you go to a monastery to become yourself. A film about a monastery that is really about a monastery is a film where you come out of the film and you know a little bit more about yourself but you know nothing about a monasteries because you have been in a monastery. If you want know about monasteries, go to a good historian.

From the point of view of what’s media and religion, this is where they are really joined. And this is why it’s really a cinema film. You need the confinement of the audience that they are not free to go in and out like all the time in an exhibition—you need the confinement of time and the darkness of space.

This is where the amazing parallels come in: cinema is like a monastery. It’s the only medium that discards everything apart from what is in the cinema and that really confines you—you go in there and the door is going to be closed behind you. Basically it should be locked by we don’t do that.

DESPERATE MOMENTS

AZ: What did you learn through such a long filmmaking experience?

PG: I learned a couple of things: to have confidence as an artist, and as a human being, in what comes. This experience of living with these people, who are very free individuals because they are extremely themselves, and happy. They live in an absence of fear, not afraid of death, of things going wrong. They think everything is being taken care of –that is something that has stayed with me.

As an artist I came there and I thought: Well, what can I film? There were moments over and over again when I was totally desperate, thinking I can not go and shoot another thing in that cloister, one more monk ringing a bell. I just can’t bear it any more. I thought: I have to quit filming, because nothing is coming up, and then—and this is why it was so important to do it alone— being not able to discuss that with anybody and sitting there in my cell, or wandering around the cloister, I would suddenly see something like the fruits on the table that would be of such an extreme beauty, I would think—OK here you are, stupid, thinking about where you can go to find a great image instead of just looking around. This is something that I hope will stay –we’ll see in the next film—this confidence that things are always already there.

I hope I gained confidence going through the editing. This was very scary, sort of being out there on the open sea for 2 ½ years with no rules to apply to anything. The only one who was an influence on that were Mark Rothko’s paintings because I met those paintings as though they were persons two-thirds of the way through the editing –and it changed the editing a lot—seeing someone trying to go to something very absolute and actually he’s managing to do it, he’s not failing. OK he falls apart later on, kills himself. But first he’s managed to do that. He touched the absolute by getting rid of all the safe constructions that could have helped him to know what he was doing. He must have gone through hell not knowing because this is the only way he could do what he did.

And I had an accident on the shoot. I fell off a cliff wall, 18 feet down, vertically onto a patch of gravel, and I thought I was dead but I wasn’t. There were 40 seconds—I studied medicine and lying there, I had no pain, and I thought, OK 18 foot cliff, vertical fall, no pain. You broke your neck, you have 45 seconds and it’s going to go dark, another 50 seconds and it’s going to go silent. So I was looking up and thinking, everything is so beautiful. Then once it was clear that I could move, I started thinking about a broken cable on the camera. And then I had a total breakdown and started to cry, because I was so overwhelmed by having lived, and on the other hand, by how quickly I was willing to go back into efficiency. What are we really doing with this obsession with efficiency, what are we doing with our lives?

AZ: The well-trained mind…

PG: You barely survive and the first thing you do…. It’s the adrenalin that does it.

AZ: I see. Like when I am coming home and my mind is ahead of me, taking out my key and rehearsing exactly how it will fit into the lock… Trying to grasp and control the future.

PG: The amazing thing about being there, in the absence of speech your inner structuring of constantly turning to the future also disappears, and my capacity for planning has been drastically reduced. A monastery is about getting rid of speech. Speech is constantly implying this logical way of structuring time and thought. Silence throws you into the present, in the sense of not thinking about how you get your key out of your pocket.

The immediate object, the presence of immediate things, becomes much more luminous. It’s really like a consolation. The material world, the creation, helps you to be in the world, it’s as if God had created the world in order for us to feel at home. But that sort of future planning capacity really drops.

This is what the monastery is about; this is what I tried in the film.

I’m always really nervous when the moment comes when you just see this fruit on the table because I think sometimes it makes you really happy—it’s really a joyful experience—and then I know the film is working because there is no way you’re going to ask yourself, as an audience, what is the significance of these fruits, who do they belong to, where am I, which cell is this? You’re just looking at them. That’s when the monastery happens in the film because you’re just in the moment of perception. You’re just perceiving what is around you.

Basic happiness is just perception of what is around you. Without spoiling it. If you can do that, you’ve done It.

SMALL BUT DEEP

AZ: What about repetition for you as an artist?

PG: I think repetition is the absolute core of all art. I teach at a couple of film schools, like Cal Arts, at the Academy in Germany, I always say: you have the choice, the repetition is always there, what Hollywood cinema does, genre film, is export it. You have the classic action film opening shot, and you immediately know: this is a certain genre. And so the repetition is outside, in the other films you’ve already seen of the same genre. But if you don’t do the genre thing, then you need some repetition because it gives you as the viewer the rhythm. Repetition is the only element of style that is recurring need through all my films. The only way we have of perceiving time is through rhythm. We can’t perceive linear time. We can only perceive ripples of water, the swinging of leaves.

And repetition, on a personal level, is the deeper way of understanding. Learning something new every day is not getting you very far. Looking at the same thing again and again is actually the way of insight that contemplation goes toward. So this is why it’s in the film—the monks’ life is repetition.

It’s a different approach….you say to yourself, I’ll just look at a very limited field, and looking at that field over and over again will change me, and that field, and it will make me join with the world at a deeper level than looking at different things all the time. Which is maybe broadening your horizon, but lessening your touch.

AZ: I felt that very keenly in your film. Not so easy or so simple to convey, because the monastery itself is built upon repetition. How to restructure the repetition so that it is not just documentation of repetition, but maybe overlays two styles of repetition?

PG: Absolutely! There was a moment when we tried just simply to edit the film along how their day was structured, and then you fall flat, And it doesn’t open up.

A STRUCTURE TO CARRY YOU

AZ: What is your fondest wish for your audience?

PG: If the audience, while watching the film, get to know themselves, be put into possession of their own time. If in the viewer, personal things come up—questions or images that have nothing on the surface to do with the film, but that are things you would not usually dare to have come up because you need a structure to carry you to have them come up.

AZ: Did you get surprising responses?

PG: Many. People go and see it often. The mother in law of my exec producer went to see it 8 times. She’s a psycho-analyst. A person in Rome saw it twelve times. Then the reaction I was surprised by most, was that so many people come up to me or go on the website and express gratitude—it’s not that they say “This is a great film” they say “thank you for the time we had.’ And now in France, it seems like a phenomena of people going in and starting to pray in the cinema Maybe this is a misunderstanding… But on another level, I wanted the film to transform into a monastery and this is what happens.

AZ: It feels very Buddhist, but you are not Buddhist—do you have a meditation practice?

PG: Oh no. I’m Catholic. And it’s very deliberate that I did not do this film on Buddhist monasteries. This is where the collaboration with my friend Nico ended. When we could not get into the monastery he asked, why don’t we go to Tibet? I said I want to do this for myself, to find out why I am so anti-religious, having being brought up so strictly Catholic. I want to heal some wounds and go back and understand where I’ve come from. I cannot understand that by going into a Buddhist monastery. I was not a Buddhist child, and my audience did not have a Buddhist childhood either. There is a problem with all those beautiful films which are for us a sort of religious tourism. Nice, but it’s not really going very deep.

Just on a theoretical level there is a mistake in going from the background you come from to an entirely fresh background. The way you know that a religion is your religion is that you have problems with it. If you don’t have problems with it, it’s not your religion.

Angela Zito is co-director of the Center for Religion and Media and director of NYU’s Religious Studies Program.