rebecca's pocket

I was hoping for a film that would bring me into the rhythms of life at the monastery. Instead, it is more of a collage of images with so little context that they don't really add up. The use of the smaller format camera really works against the filmmaker—those sections are often so grainy as to nearly obscure the images. As a result, it seems more like self-indulgence than anything else. I had to rely a lot on my prior knowledge of the Benedictine Rule to make sense of what I was seeing, and even so, I didn't get a good sense of the days and weeks of a monk.

I think the filmmaker could have followed the same rules—no voiceovers, no soundtrack, nothing but images of real life—and produced a beautiful portrait of monastic life, but, for me at least, this isn't it. [ 03.18.07 ]