Sh-h-h.(The Talk of the Town)(Into Great Silence, documentary)(Interview)

It can be hard to find a quiet spot to think in this town, and movie theatres generally don't top the list. Lately, however, Film Forum has emerged as an oasis of silence, owing to the runaway success of a nearly three-hour documentary, by the German filmmaker Philip Groning, about Carthusian monks, titled "Into Great Silence." Groning spent five months at the Grande Chartreuse, a monastery in the French Alps. Because Carthusians obey a rule against speaking (apart from chants, meetings with superiors, a few hours of casual conversation every Monday, and emergencies), interviews were out of the question. Most of the film consists of wordless shots of monks being monks--watering their gardens, preparing meals, praying in solitude, praying in groups. Originally scheduled for a two-week run, the film has been extended indefinitely.

In deference to the needs of gabby New Yorkers, Film Forum enlisted a Carthusian, Father Michael Holleran, to conduct Q. & A. sessions following some screenings. (Never mind the irony inherent in a talkback for a movie about silence.) Holleran is, to his knowledge, the only Carthusian living in New York City. On a recent Sunday afternoon, having just finished saying a Spanish-language Mass in the Bronx, where he lives, he caught a No. 2 train to Houston Street. He took a seat between a man blasting hip-hop on his headphones and a woman who continually zipped and unzipped the compartments of her handbag. "I love the sound of the subway," Holleran said. "Ever since I was a teen-ager I have, even before I went to the monastery."

Holleran, who is fifty-seven, grew up on Long Island and entered the order when he was twenty-two. He spent twelve years at a Carthusian monastery in Vermont before moving to the Grande Chartreuse, where he stayed for seven years. (He left before the film was made.) He doesn't regret his time as a monk, but, after two decades of near-speechlessness, he began to doubt the spiritual benefits of isolation. "The monastic archetype is in all of us, but I'm not sure that living it out for your entire life is really a viable thing," he said. Plus, he found wearing an ankle-length robe all the time "a little hard to bear," and wanted to catch up ...