Philip Gröning
Il Grande Silenzio

"The essence of cinematic art is precisely time, and after this film, I don't believe I can achieve such purity again.” P. Groening

It has always been difficult and almost impossible to “convey silence and inner peace” in cinema. That sense of bliss that one manages to perceive through painstaking work on oneself and that is only felt during certain periods of one's life, perhaps following certain harrowing or emotionally touching experiences, like the death of a close relative or separation from a loved one.
That intense and uncertain drifting of the soul that demands, indeed, only a great silence, not so different from or far from what one breathes in this film "Into Great Silence" (2005) by the German director Philip Gröning, who had patience and calm to spare.

Sixteen (16!) years were spent waiting before getting the permits and authorization to access the Grande Chartreuse, an ancient monastery located in the mountains near Grenoble, France, and thus being able to film the rigorous and austere life of the cloistered monks, who spend practically entire periods of the year in sacred silence from morning to night.
Almost six months was the shooting period within the monastery walls (using high-quality cameras like High Definition, mainly employed by George Lucas) with kilometers of film capturing and unveiling, in fact, the ancestral mystery of the golden rules of this timeless community.
Almost four months was spent on editing and sound mixing to achieve the perfect balance between imagery and acoustics in a film/documentary made practically of nothing that gradually leads us to abandon everything and rediscover the Great Void surrounding us in an attempt to restore the connection with that pulsating and deep area hidden within each of us.
A whispered film, therefore, made on tiptoe, respectful of the places it wishes to describe and which becomes a monk itself in respecting the strict rules of this place, light years away from the world and civil society.

The soundtrack is extremely rare; here, the true protagonists are the gentle gazes of the monks, the seemingly insignificant small things, the peeling walls, the distant sound of bells, the prayer in the common refectory, all seasoned with an unreal slowness that inexorably marks the minutes, stretching them beyond any notion of space and time.

Certainly an undeniably demanding film and not easy to embrace (it lasts almost 3 hours!) that caused many defections and abandonments after just 20 minutes in the cinema, but a film that in its own way enchants by being beyond anything already seen and a necessary film towards the most intimate, and I dare say “sacred” part of our being, which too often is marginalized and mistreated by our superficiality and our focus on predominantly trivial things, those that gratify exclusively our material Ego, the real “drug” of our exacerbated living and, therefore, perpetually unsatisfied.