Post by Capo on Apr 17, 2007 23:27:27 GMT
Die Große Stille
Into Great Silence
Phillip Gröning 2005 France / Switzerland / Germany
Documentary on the silent Carthusian Monks in the Grande Chartreuse, France.
Like the monks themselves, Gröning goes about his business in a very humble, almost silent fashion, with no music, no voice-over, almost no interviews. It's an interesting premise because the subject matter is so unique, but it's a complete waste of an opportunity; to be frank, it is one of the most annoying, dumbfounding and frustrating documentaries made. In fact, it lacks the required insight to be classed as a documentary, and certainly isn't expressive enough to be a feature in its own right - it captures various activities without any insight as to why they go about what they do, why it is that these men have chosen a life of complete seclusion; it only serves to mystify these monks further, instead of de-mystifying them, so that anybody coming into the documentary not knowing who they are or what they do leaves the theatre having endured three hours of point-and-shoot filming of various religious rituals which aren't given any context at all. It defeats its own purpose: Gröning apparently waited close to two decades to get permission to film there, and the final product falls way short of revealing anything interesting about a potentially fascinating subject. The time-lapse shots, of the entire vicinity in the snowy mountains, are effective in their tranquility, but are completely undercut by inconsistent transitions (the film has no rhythm at all) and lazily assembled intertitles, quotations from the Bible. These quotations have some sort of obscure connection to the footage surrounding them, a bit like the Victorian quotations preceding each chapter in Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman; but while Fowles did immense research in assembling an eclectic, convincing range of quotes from all kinds of different sources, Gröning uses two or three and peppers them throughout his documentary as if to hammer the same point home time and time again, to the effect that, by the end of the film, you know what each intertitle says in French and German before the English subtitles come up translate it for us.
Into Great Silence
Phillip Gröning 2005 France / Switzerland / Germany
Documentary on the silent Carthusian Monks in the Grande Chartreuse, France.
Like the monks themselves, Gröning goes about his business in a very humble, almost silent fashion, with no music, no voice-over, almost no interviews. It's an interesting premise because the subject matter is so unique, but it's a complete waste of an opportunity; to be frank, it is one of the most annoying, dumbfounding and frustrating documentaries made. In fact, it lacks the required insight to be classed as a documentary, and certainly isn't expressive enough to be a feature in its own right - it captures various activities without any insight as to why they go about what they do, why it is that these men have chosen a life of complete seclusion; it only serves to mystify these monks further, instead of de-mystifying them, so that anybody coming into the documentary not knowing who they are or what they do leaves the theatre having endured three hours of point-and-shoot filming of various religious rituals which aren't given any context at all. It defeats its own purpose: Gröning apparently waited close to two decades to get permission to film there, and the final product falls way short of revealing anything interesting about a potentially fascinating subject. The time-lapse shots, of the entire vicinity in the snowy mountains, are effective in their tranquility, but are completely undercut by inconsistent transitions (the film has no rhythm at all) and lazily assembled intertitles, quotations from the Bible. These quotations have some sort of obscure connection to the footage surrounding them, a bit like the Victorian quotations preceding each chapter in Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman; but while Fowles did immense research in assembling an eclectic, convincing range of quotes from all kinds of different sources, Gröning uses two or three and peppers them throughout his documentary as if to hammer the same point home time and time again, to the effect that, by the end of the film, you know what each intertitle says in French and German before the English subtitles come up translate it for us.