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Into Great Silence: Presence, Absence, And The Edge Of Documentary, Steven Schoen

Faculty Publications

Thus, the filmic depiction of monastic austerity found in Into Great Silence might be said to offer a kind of hint at the insights of monastic practice, at the stark limits of the physical world experienced bodily in a life of ascetic deprivation, prayer, silence, and isolation. The monks’ path to the edge of that world and the boundary of transcendence is instead constituted for viewers as profoundly real through an experience of austerity via the film. As the temporal conventions and narrative forms of documentary are ruptured, viewers are left to study the edge of its surfaces for its …