A friend commented yesterday that if she had more time and money she'd see every film showing at the Red Vic. Can't say I totally agree with her (ten dollars for Aqua Teen Hunger Force doesn't seem right to me), but they're definitely on to something -- everything they show is at least interesting. Including tonight's feature.
It's called Into Great Silence, and while it's not exactly a nail-biter (it's a documentary, yes, but it's more like a Gustave Le Gray print than what we're accustomed to from documentarians), it's worth seeing. From the writeup in Slant:
"Nearly 20 years after his initial request, filmmaker Philip Gröning was granted permission by the General Prior of the Grande Chartreuse monastery, located high in the French Alps, to document the day-to-day routines of the reclusive Carthusian Order of Monks, a centuries-old Roman Catholic brotherhood of whom next to no aural or visual documentation exists. Gröning was required to live and work among the monks, filming by himself on hi-definition video and Super 8 for only a few hours a day, using only available light and sound. The resulting work, Into Great Silence, is a masterful object of contemplation, a 162-minute journey into a cloistered world of ritualistic repetition, always with the promise of revelation and transcendence."
Shows tonight at 8:30pm
Red Vic Movie House
1727 Haight Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
Related: Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic, Carthusian Monks in the French Alps, official site, IMDB.
It's probably worth linking to the short New Yorker piece about this film...
Posted at: July 2, 2007 4:07 PM