Venice Dispatch. 7.

A film festival's atmosphere is determined as much by the mood of the crowds as by anything else. Many are talking about the sparsity of the crowds at Venice this year, something which was even felt by one festival veteran I spoke with who's been coming here for 35-odd years (apart from the brief period in the 70s when the festival was closed). Capacity screenings are a rarity, walkouts the order of the day. At a reception on St Giorgio Island for the Secret History of Asian Cinema program, a security guard on duty (who became incredibly talkative about his love for old black-and-white Italian movies, particularly Divorce Italian Style, after I had a few martinis with him), said that the seven security guards on the island where often faced with an audience of maybe three or four people, if they were lucky, for the restored prints of many difficult-to-see and/or previously lost classics.

This, however, was not the case at a screening of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. The Sala Grande was filled to the brim. Yet so many in the press were locked out that their riotous protest drowned out the sounds of the film. Ten minutes in, Clooney, slightly vexed, got up and called the projection to a halt, insisting that the mob outside, so eager to see his film, be admitted. This kind of fervor, however, is a rarity, and a large number of films have been met with apathy or more often intense dislike.

The German documentary Die Grosse Stille had a ¾-full cinema when it began, but by the time its third hour kicked in, there were only a devoted few left. Philip Gröning's near-silent document of the monastic lifestyle of a group of monks living in one of the world's most ascetic monasteries was perhaps too heavy on the spiritual overtones for most midday viewers. I think what antagonized many of them was the unbearable silence of the film - there are only two short scenes in which the monks talk, and the rest of the film, the rest of their lives, play out with the volume turned down. I say "unbearable silence" because Gröning accentuates the silence to a point where this "nothingness" seems to burst with an intensity that can not be ignored.

Not since Bresson has a director used silence to so fully convey a sense of spirituality. But whereas Bresson only ever used a few short scenes of it in his tightly-edited features, Gröning drags it out for the entire running time and does so because he wants to convey something larger than just moments of silent spiritual awareness. He wants to convey the scope of entire lives lived in this fashion, of entire lives in which the volume of the ordinary world has been turned off and a sense of "infinity" (what some might call "God"), has been turned up - for these monks, and for Gröning, it is an infinity which is constituted in the everyday tasks of their lives, whether it be feeding cats, mending a shoe, or reading a holy text.

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2005 9:46 AM