Xavier Beauvois' Of Gods and Men is a film about faith, community, martyrdom, and monks. It's also a film that became something of a phenomenon in France last fall, garnering box-office numbers more typical of an American blockbuster import than a contemplative film about religion. Perhaps that's due to the film's timely subject matter (Christian-Muslim relations), or maybe it's because there's an increasing hunger for films unafraid of sincerity. In the midst of a contemporary cinema accustomed to cynicism and despair, Of Gods and Men—the Grand Prix award winner at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival—stands out as a luminous testimony to hope. It's a film that speaks directly into our present situation, and yet also transcends it.

Directed by Beauvois and written by screenwriter Etienne Comar, Of Gods and Men is based loosely on the experiences of a small group of Cistercian monks in Tibhirine, Algeria in 1996. [1] As the film begins, we observe the peaceful rhythms of life within the monastery: a group of about eight monks, led by Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson), pray, sing, worship, and serve the Muslim community in which they live. The elderly monastery doctor, Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale), offers free medical treatment to the ailing in the nearby village. Several monks attend local Muslim ceremonies and celebrations to show their love and support. The monastery's homemade honey is sold in local markets. It's a vision for how Christians and Muslims can live alongside and learn from one another in a peaceful, mutually beneficial way.

But this community of peace is under threat, as Algeria faces violent civil war between government forces and Islamist insurgents. Early in the film—in one of its rare moments of bloody violence—a group of European construction workers are ambushed and brutally slaughtered by the terrorist insurgents. This event, coupled with warnings for all foreigners to exit the country or risk a similar fate, catalyzes the main conflict of the film for the protagonists: Should they stay in Algeria, steadfastly committed to their mission at the monastery but knowing that terror will one day come knocking, or should they save their lives by fleeing the country?

Whatever they decide, one thing is clear: The monks are committed to making the decision as a group. Several conversations between the men ensue, revealing a model process for how tough decisions can be reached in community and how issues of individuality, sacrifice, and hierarchy can peacefully be negotiated with wisdom and charity. It's an environment of openness, where all perspectives are welcomed, including fear and doubt. One younger monk in particular (Olivier Rabourdin) struggles with apprehension about staying and lets his frustrations show. Eventually the monks do arrive at a conclusion: They'll stay.

In one of the film's most remarkable sequences, the monks sit silently at the U-shaped communal dinner table, pondering the decision they've made together. One of the monks puts on an old tape of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, which, as it builds and climaxes, leads the men to a state of sublime contentedness. Letting the music wash over them, sensing the Last Supper solemnity of the occasion, they seem united by the conviction that—even in the face of death—beauty prevails. Cinematographer Carline Champetier captures the moment by tenderly observing the monks' faces in gradually closer framing, so that by the climax of the music we get glimpses of each man's face in extreme closeup, revealing joy, tears, resolve, and oneness in Christ.

Though it serves as a historical testament and instructive commentary on contemporary culture, Of Gods and Men is more. It's a transcendent film. In Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader argues for a three-step process whereby transcendence is achieved stylistically in cinema: 1) Meticulously representing the banal and everyday; 2) Confronting a disparity or disunity between man and his environment, which culminates in a decisive action; and 3) Ending with stasis, a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it.

Beauvois' film certainly seems to fit the bill. Shot in a monastery in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the film adopts the point of view of the monks and intimately tunes its ear to the rhythms of life in a Cistercian monastery. Reminiscent of 2006's Into Great Silence, another great "inside the lives of monks" film, Of Gods and Men takes time to observe the offering of prayers, the singing of hymns and chants, the making of honey, the writing of letters and the passing of food at dinner. This sort of meticulous interest in the monks' simple existence not only provides the viewer with a believable portrait of monastery life but also "prepares reality for the intrusion of the Transcendent," notes Schrader.[2]

There is also clear disparity: the building tension between the monks' peaceful way of life and the terrorists outside the monastery doors. Schrader says this sort of disparity "extends spiritual schizophrenia—that acute sense of two opposing worlds—to the viewer," building up an unresolved tension.[3]

Finally, there is a conclusion of stasis, which Schrader says is the trademark of religious art in every culture: "It establishes an image of a second reality which can stand beside the ordinary reality; it represents the Wholly Other."[4]

The final shot of Gods certainly suggests this sort of stasis. In a snowy, foggy setting in the mountains of Algeria, we watch as our monks are led away to an unknown place. Clad in white, the monks blend in with their surroundings, and as the static camera observes them growing gradually smaller and fainter as they march away, we understand that it is not necessarily a physical place we are seeing them enter but a place of rest, peace, oneness—the glorious fulfillment of the Tchaikovsky foretaste. It's a sublime ending, leading the audience as well to a place of quiet contemplation. But Gods is transcendent not only in the way it reflects upon the martyrdom of the monks, but also in its portrayal of how they live.

These Christian monks, living quietly in a hostile land, flourish in a way that is thoroughly incarnational. Place matters for them. They are not cloistered hermits, hidden away from the world around them, existing in some isolated spiritual reverie. Rather, they are actively seeking to understand their neighbors, their surroundings, to thrive in and through their physical context. They embody a theology of "faithful presence," as James Davison Hunter writes in To Change the World: "When the Word of all flourishing—defined by the love of Christ—becomes flesh in us, in our relations with others, within the tasks we are given, and within our sphere of influence—absence gives way to presence, and the word we speak to each other and to the world becomes authentic and trustworthy."[5] Hunter adds that "faithful presence" prioritizes "what is right in front of us—the community, the neighborhood, the city, and the people of which these are constituted."

The monks in Of Gods and Men are mindful of their surroundings, rooted in the place where they've been called to be light. They are so present, so committed to the Algerian people, that ultimately they find it impossible to leave, even at the risk of death. As Brother Christian expresses in a written testament heard in voiceover near the end of the film: "I know the contempt the people of this country may have indiscriminately been surrounded by. And I know which caricatures of Islam a certain Islamism encourages. This country and Islam, for me, are something else. They are a body and a soul."

For these monks, the Word and the world are intimately connected. Who they are in Christ necessarily has bearing on how they manifest themselves in the world. As such, they endeavor to live out the humility and sacrificial love of Christ toward each other, their Muslim neighbors, and even their terrorist enemies. In the midst of war and turbulent civic unrest, the monks carry on, faithfully present to the end. As Brother Luc wrote in a letter during his last months in the monastery: "We are in a 'risky' situation but we persist in our faith and our confidence in God …. I don't know when or how it will all end. In the meantime, I perform my duty."

Brett McCracken is managing editor for Biola University's Biola Magazine. He is the author of Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide (Baker).

1. The story is told by John Kiser in The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria (St. Martin's, 2002).

2. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film (Univ. of California Press, 1972), p. 39.

3. Ibid., p. 43.

4. Ibid., p. 49.

5. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), p. 252.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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