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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 16-APR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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