Philip Gröning
Die Große Stille

Two seemingly unapproachable universes are those I will dare to suggest in a subliminal liaison, yet in some ways, the two entities under examination might appear contiguous if not bound by the same idiosyncratic philosophy: approaching and making representable, vaguely tangible: nothingness.

"At All Ends" by the pentagrammatic catastrophists Yellow Swans and "Die Große Stille" by Philip Gröning seem to direct, each with its extreme and antithetical approach to the other's expressive module, their gaze towards the unrepresentable. One might dispute that in one way and another, one faces extreme works if not merely gratuitous, essentially unintelligible: empty exercises in style. Indeed, this could be, for some, a plausible reading of the inexpressible events set in motion.

"Die Große Stille" (The Great Silence) the latest cinematic-documentary work by the courageous Teutonic filmmaker is a feature-length, strictly documentary shot entirely inside, and in the adjacent areas of, the Abbazia Certosina de La Grande Chartreuse, a monastery located in the French Alps near the city of Grenoble. A considerable and exhausting endeavor from its very inception: Gröning, in fact, waited about twenty years before he was granted permission to live the same experience [this is the core of the work] as the regular inhabitants of the Monastery: like every member of the community, Philip wanted and had to live, sharing and contributing with his concrete operation to the normal routine of daily activities, both liturgical and merely operational, for a (perhaps infinite?) period of about four months.

Based on the result Gröning presents us, trying to encapsulate its essence within 160 minutes of brilliant film, it must have been a singular yet extraordinary experience, whether one is a believer or not, from which it is certainly difficult to return without undergoing significant changes deep within.

The (truly) absolute silence and the cyclically seraphic reiteration of the same rituals dominate uncontested, pervading and annihilating the (unaware) viewer: the only moments within the day where one hears the fulfilled but unyielding voice of the brothers are those linked to the times when they carry out the numerous rites aimed at imploring activities.

I don't know if the director in this placidly chilling pamphlet attempted to stochastically represent the existence of God and the deliberate Faith put into action for His use and purpose, or whether he more humanly tried to sketch a sort of psycho-cinematic profile (not necessarily pathological) of the community members and the seemingly inscrutable - for us humble sinners/eccentric worldly men - reasons for which they have indulged in the luxury of such an ascetic and highly improbable existence; the fact remains that despite the supreme, sacred, prevailing nothingness (or everything: each may decide) represented there, the result fascinates and enamors precisely by virtue of this overarching sense of impossibility of fundamental discernment.

To be scrutinized, for contrast and completeness, as an unhealthy yet perfect visual soundtrack to the pentagrammatic "Nothingness" captured on optical disc by the last, now deceased, Yellow Swans.