Rod Dreher on "Into Great Silence"

It’s been a few weeks since I included any more raves here for the year’s most important and memorable film so far.

So here we go…

Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher discovers Into Great Silence.

It is an amazing film — in fact, this is probably the closest anybody will ever come to embodying prayer on film. … This beautifully shot film forces you to pay attention to the tiniest things: the way the light falls on a bowl of fruit, the sound of a monk’s scissors on rough fabric as he prepares a new cowl, the Rembrandt-like pathos of a single beam of sunlight from a high window striking a monk preparing to chant in the Gothic chapel. There is about this film a quality of lucidity that takes your breath away.

But he’s wrong about one thing…

“Into Great Silence” contains no narration and no interviews; it just is.

In fact, there is an excerpt from an interview at the very end of the film, in which one of the monks talks about the happiness of serving the Lord through a life of prayer.

Thanks to Peter Chattaway for the link.