Just watched two amazing films recently: Man on Wire, and Into Great Silence. The films could hardly be more different – what connection is there between a tight-rope walker and Carthusian monks? – but I felt a deep sense of affinity between them. Both films draw you in. Both films give a radical picture of a different, transcendent way of life. Both films depict intense individual and communal discipline and focus, and yet also, incredible fruitfulness and creativity.
In a sense, Man on Wire is the more artistically inspiring of the two. It is incredible to see someone do something so beautiful, so surprising, so dangerous. It becomes inconsequential that the act is illegal – in fact, that only contributes to the surprise and beauty in a positive way (even the NYPD and the district attorney at the time, 1974, had to admit this).
Into Great Silence also manages to capture some of the same spirit of radical, beautiful departure from the norms of society. At first, I had the thought How do they get anything done? There’s so much praying, silence, waiting, chore-doing. But by the end, I had changed my tune. There was a real sense of liberation in the monks’ ascetic lifestyle (at least in the film). They had the freedom to do things that mattered – all day, every day. It seemed the exact opposite of my obsession with “getting things done.”
The most significant commonality I was able to see between these two films was that both show a discipline of being overwhelmed and re-inspired toward the highest possible aims. Both the monks and Philip Petit (the wire-walker) displayed a lack of self-consciousness made possible by the hugeness of their aims and surroundings – the utter absence of false humility.
