I was ready to stop watching "Into Great Silence" after forty minutes.<br /><br />I did not have a problem with the film's slowness, although it is slow. I did not have a problem with the religious topic, or the arty shots. I was uncomfortable being a voyeur.<br /><br />"Into Great Silence" has no voice-over narration, no explanation of monastery life, and no narrative structure. Much of the time, the viewer is staring at monks attending to their daily functions: praying, eating, doing manual labor.<br /><br />Given that nothing comes between us and them, I felt uncomfortable -- that I was staring at strangers. So, I stopped watching.<br /><br />I thought about it for a while, and reminded myself that the monks had agreed to be filmed, and were not being filmed surreptitiously.<br /><br />I began watching the film again, and liked it better. While watching it, I moved into its slow pace. My expectation level meshed with the film's pace.<br /><br />This is the best film I've seen for capturing the kind of life one lives in primitive isolation -- a life I was lucky enough to live for a while myself. Motes of dust in shafts of sunlight, the sound a pair of scissors make while cutting through cloth, the physical stamina needed to complete labor, the taste of the most common repasts: all become all-encompassing, without addictive modern society to suck at one's soul.<br /><br />that the film also conveys the monks' commitment to Christ is a bonus. The more people who come to understand what Christianity is, the better. The monastery life is not the only expression of Christianity, but it is a significant one. Monks, as historians remind us, created the foundations of Europe, not just in their scholarship and their faith, but also in their industry and agriculture.<br /><br />I hope viewers will give the film a chance, including viewers who might become impatient with its slowness and its difference at first.