Silence
I watched a couple of things yesterday (one a TV documentary and the other a film) which were both — in their different ways — about silence, isolation, and internal mental strength. The coincidence of watching them both in the same night wasn’t planned, but they made a very interesting pair of companion pieces.
The first was a documentary called “Real Men Under Pressure” about saturation divers working on North Sea oil installations on the sea bed. The other was Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille), a film about Carthusian monks in the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. Two more dissimilar subjects, you would think, would be hard to find, but there were a lot of parallels.
