All Stories
Mar 18, 2011
Out of Frame: Of Gods and Men
Not a single note of incidental music plays on the soundtrack to Of Gods and Men. But just because every sound we hear is generated onscreen doesn’t mean that director Xavier Beauvois isn’t using sound just as strategically as the most grandiosely scored films. Like the best musicians, in fact, Beauvois knows the power of silence, and employs it liberally. The result are long, languorous stretches in which the eight Trappist monks at the center of the story go about their daily tasks, or roam the countryside contemplatively.