LOVE IS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY...

Mirabile dictu! Lingua Latina superavit!

Mea culpa...and speaking of forgiveness, who'd have thought a double-bill review of the penguin animation film Happy Feet and the monk documentary Into the Great Silence was possible. Well... let me start by suggesting some Christmas reading to you. In fact, you don't have to be Christian at all to appreciate this as the author Simone Weil was an agnostic. That's before she was born into a rich Jewish family, supported Communism at the Sorbonne University in Paris - nicknamed "the red virgin"- and fought against Franco in Spain. She died in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent in England. Extracts from her writings are in bold:

To forgive. We cannot do this. When we are harmed by someone, reactions are set up within us. The desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium. We must seek equilibrium on another plane. We have to go as far as this limit by ourselves. There we reach the void.

It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or wish to give) the people we love any other consolation than that which works of art give us, which help us through the mere fact that they exist.... If there are grounds for wishing to be understood, it is not for ourselves but for the other, in order that we may exist for him.

Philip Gröning's doco Into Great Silence is released by the same enterprising Soda Pictures who gave us the fab vampire film Frostbite. It's 162 min, mostly silent, of the Grande Chartreuse French alps monastery - Cathusian order. George Miller's Happy Feet is based on the doco March of the Penguins about the trials and tribulations of talking Emperor penguins. The protagonists in both films, the monks and Mumble the penguin sprog (Elijah Wood), are searching for enlightenment. Mumble is born feet first, can't sing (i.e. has no ‘heart-song’ essential for a penguin’s mating) but dances like a cross between Fred Astaire, Ben Vereen and Ricky Martin. The monks, on the other hand don't dance but aren't allowed any musical instruments only Gregorian chant. But Mumble and the monks do share a love of snow surfing. Maybe they're grappling with Simone Weil:

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.

We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves.
If we accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us from loving the universe?

We have the assurance that, come what may, the universe is full.
We can obey the force of gravity or we can obey the relationship of things. In the first case, we do what we are driven to by the imagination which fills up empty spaces.... If we suspend the filling-up activity of the imagination and fix our attention on the relationship of things, a necessity becomes apparent which we cannot help obeying.... Obedience is the only pure motive.... The obedience must however, be obedience to necessity and not to force.

The trouble with Happy Feet is nobody seems to die from the cruel winds of fate so artfully conjured by the computer animation, unlike the March of the Penguins doco. Not that they do in Silence on camera, although an old monk speaks of his blindness. The only trouble I had with Silence was the dozen captions of devotional Biblical text during the film. These tend to break our contemplation in a rather Brechtian way, not something I think the director intended. Gröning wanted to create “a film like a cloud” and evoke the rigidity and rhythm of the monks’ daily life. Happy Feet’s rhythm really started so well. Like Weil, Mumble does not believe in the animistic conventional wisdom of Noah and the Elders: that the fish shortage is caused by "the great wind". He is the only one to doubt the ring-pull evangelism of Robin Williams' Lovelace, entertain the possibility of aliens and search for enlightenment with his new Chicano pengpals. Nobody coerces him into this. And though March of the Penguins had a tendency to fall into cutesy narrative it wonderfully evoked the rhythm of their life. Happy Feet's ending plunges the film back into Christmas card carol territory. Did you know that in the Coptic scriptures there were about 40 wise-men not just three? I wish director George Miller had created an ending more akin to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey hallucinatory sequence or Hitchcock's Spellbound and Mumble had discovered the vow of silence. And a bit more South Park to scuff the immaculate CGI might have helped. But that would be my film and not George Miller's. Silence, is mostly shot on digital High Definition and is brilliant for it. The nature of HD craves light sources (and the director wasn’t allowed any artificial light) but there are snatches of Super 8 film that, though beautiful, seem present only for atmospheric effect, scuffing HD in the way the captions do. I leave the last word to Simone Weil:


He who believes in God is in danger of a still greater illusion, that of attributing to grace what is simply an essentially mechanical effect of nature.

We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything, except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.