although su-lin and choonping clearly didn't take to it, i really liked die grosse stille, which we saw at the museum - i think it was more than a week ago? i should have written about it immediately after, but i was exhausted, mind and body, from the moving, and i don't think i can do more than make brief comments about the snatches of memory retained:

i had been intimidated before by the reviews, mostly because people keep discussing it as an experience of "silence" and "meditation" and "austerity," but when i had been i thought that the real conclusion you had to draw, that i drew, was precisely the opposite, and that, john cage's 4'33'', has already convinced us of long ago.

the other thing was that in this imposed human silence (both within the film and within the auditorium) the amplification of the slightest sound - rough cloth being cut by scissors, the trickle of thawing ice, a plough withdrawn from heaped snow, like an unsheathing, not muffled but crisp - this amplification became a kind of acute presence which imbued your senses with tension.

and the pace, and the repetition, and repetitiveness, that is what is so precisely clever, effective, in representing and simulating experience. and within the film a second sense of time outside the monastery - the passage of seasons measured out time - that technique, i thought, is literary more than anything else.

at the same time, the privilege of sharing the eyes of the filmmaker in the monastery (sixteen years he waited - i loved that they called him back to say yes, after all that time.) was great, and every minute brought new knowledge, new awareness. novices literally embraced into an order, the stumbling steps of an old, very old man, across a courtyard knee-high with snow, long sundays walks, and - who would forget it who has seen the film - the brothers silhouetted against high snowy slopes - and then sliding down one by one - joyful, leaving gullies behind them. fruits - bought fruit, their stickers unremoved, and someone doing the accounts before a machine - the camera lingers on the edge of the black lid with the red-green-blue ibm logo. the snow, the red and the black of latin on a page, the bell being tolled.