Host
Eurozine
Host
2008-04-09
Abstracts for Host 03/2008
Theme: Artist on the way to a monastery
The times when thinkers, writers and artists used to live mostly behind the walls of monasteries are long gone. The importance of ecclesiastical institutions has significantly decreased and artists of any kind, should they handle human existence as a whole, were forced to leave the hemmed in milieu of monasteries. The monasteries, however, still exist: they stand aloof, but they keep striving for the goals determined thousands of years ago. And there are also artists interested in monasteries and eager to penetrate into their core. This might be caused by mere appetite for something different and outlandish, the need to get to inaccessible places, or a simple refusal of the aimless plodding of our everyday lives. But it is also possible that these authors perceive monasteries as the cradle of European creative thinking and assume that a creative person shares a lot with a monk in his/her goals and means. The following thematic block introduces three authors who have had, in different times and places and in different ways, dealings with monasteries. Besides the recollections of the photographer and filmmaker Petr Francán, there are excerpts from the work of the English writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and a portrait of the German filmmaker Philip Gröning.