The Garden of Allah is a 1936 American film whose main character, Boris Androvski (played by Charles Boyer), is a Trappist monk. He – and only he – knows the secret recipe for the liquor his abbey produces, but he leaves the monastery, falls in love with a woman played by Marlene Dietrich (above), but later decides to return to his abbey and make reparations for leaving.
The film was produced by David O. Selznick and based on the 1904 novel of the same title by Robert S. Hichens, a friend of Oscar Wilde's. The novel's perceived potential as a crowd-pleaser is attested to by the fact that it was filmed twice before, as silent films in 1916 and 1927.
The film was not a commercial success, but it has been remarkably successful in diverse subcultures. Cistercian monks are not one of them; I had never heard of it until recently. In Rio, however, the Jardim de Alah was named after the movie, as was the literary hotel in Los Angeles and a bar in Seattle. Cyndi Lauper used it for the opening scene of her video Time After Time. 
One of the reasons for its strange reception may lay in the bizarre casting: Marlene Dietrich as a deeply religious Catholic, the product of a strict upbringing in a French convent school? Well...
But for those interested in Cistercian Studies, the film deserves mention for its refectory scene, in which arguably the largest number of Trappist monks, ever, appear onscreen. But it also reflects on the connection between French colonies and Trappist foundations, and – most of all – the popular perception of Trappist liquor production.  

Here is a list (in the order on the website) of Cistercian & Monastic Studies session titles with organizers' names. The full Congress Call for Papers and complete list of all sessions with descriptions and organizers' contact information can be found here: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2027/prelim.cgi

1. "Animals in the Monastic World", Ellen E. Martin, organizer
2. "Art and Architecture in Cistercian and Monastic Culture," Jason Crow, organizer (HYBRID)
3. "Benedictine and Cistercian Monastic Profession," Sr. Colleen Maura McGrane, OSB, organizer
4. "Benedictine Art and Architecture," Sr. Colleen Maura McGrane, OSB, organizer
5. ROUNDTABLE: "Caring for, Caring with, with Caring in Cistercian and Monastic Culture," Jason Crow, organizer
6. "Cistercian and Monastic Culture in Contemporary Media," Jason Crow, organizer (HYBRID)
7. "Cistercian and Monastic Mysticism," Aage Rydstrøm-Poulsen, organizer
8. "Helfta and the Embodiment of Cistercian Theology," Ella Johnson, organizer
9. "Love and Friendship in the Cistercian Tradition," Luke Donahue, organizer
10. "Memory and Monasticism," Chad Turner, organizer
11. "Monastics as Neighbors in Strange Territory," Marsha Dutton, organizer
12. "Spiritual Friendship in Cistercian Writers," Fr. Isaac Slater, OCSO, organizer

Merton's major contact to the world of photography was Shirley Burden, a convert to Catholicism who had first come to Gethsemani Abbey to shoot a book for postulants interested in entering there. He also provided the photo on the cover of Merton's Selected Poems (Pearson).
Later, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York asked Burden to return to Gethsemane and take more photos. What resulted was a remarkable book. God is my Life was published in 1960, Merton wrote the introduction.
It is a powerful evocation of daily life at the Trappist abbey on the eve of the radical changes that were to come after the Second Vatican Council. The photographs accentuate the austerity of the monks' lives and show them almost always in the context of manual labor, although the book also contains a few exquisitely beautiful liturgical shots.
In his postscript, Burden wrote that he had been fascinated by "fourteen hundred acres, two hundred men, and God."
By the time Merton published his own photography (e.g. The Call to Emptiness), he was in his eremitical phase. Reviewer Robert Bonazzi calles these "mystical photographs." The last three years of his life saw him working intensely as a photographer. He started with cheap cameras or ones that were loaned to him, until the famous photographer John Howard Griffin gave him one (they called it an indefinite loan). 

This engraving of the kitchen in La Trappe seeks to represent the upswing of one of the centers of Trappist reform in the 17th century. Times have changed dramatically. Finding a French abbey with six monks willing and able to work in the kitchen would be very difficult. 
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Sociologist Isabelle Jonveaux has examined Catholic contemplative monasteries and published her findings in La Vie. The following is taken from the Rorate Caeli blog:

Over the past twenty years, nearly a third of monasteries (approximately 30%) have closed. Women's monasteries have been proportionally harder hit: 32% of them have closed, compared to 21% of men's monasteries. And the pace is accelerating: until 2015, there were fewer than four closures per year on average. That figure now stands at around ten per year.
Carmels have seen 40% of their number close in twenty years (34 out of 85). The proportions are similar among the Poor Clares (approximately 40% closure) and the Visitation Sisters (30%). The Trappists are also facing a high rate of closure (36.4%). The Dominicans (8%) and the Benedictines — men and women combined — (18%) are comparatively less affected.  

The only monasteries where the downward trends do not apply are those with substantial use of Gregorian Chant and Latin liturgies, in general.  

This 1921 drawing from the Venerable English College (Rome) depicts a seminary professor who is particularly up to date with the latest technology.

St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena are two saints famous for having received the stigmata, that is the wounds of the Crucified Christ on their own bodies. That was a subject much-desired in the High Middle Ages. But is it possible that St. Bernard's (legendary) amplexus was a stop along the iconographic road that led to the stigmata? Consider the following images of Francis and and then, a modern image of Bernard, whose legendary reception of the Crucified's embrace would have pre-dated Francis.

Adelheid Krah has been working on this treasure trove of administrative records now in Munich and mostly online. Using these sources, she published a monograph about women in the Diocese of Freising, who played a multifaceted role in shaping the region's cultural landscape. Of course, the records also shed new light on the Cistercian monk-bishop-crusader Otto of Freising (1111–1158). According to Krah, theses records reveal a predominantly feminine society which spanned centuries.

Jamie St. Clair Collings (Centre for Medieval Studies, U of Toronto) presented a paper in Kalamazoo 2026 on "Tiles and the Role of Geometricity in Later 12th- and 13th-c. Cistercian Spiritual Practice." These examples of Cistercian craftsmanship have often been neglected because they are difficult to find. Most abbeys (whether ruins or vibrant communities) don't have these floors in their churches. The tile designs show simple geometrical forms in the tradition of grisaille windows and the geometrically decorated manuscripts we consider to be classically Cistercian. The strictness was used to avoid curiositas. Abbeys had their own quarries and kilns. Collings stated that is was remarkable that the first regulation of tiles by the General Chapter took place as late as 1218.

This capital from Zwettl Abbey ist relatively festive for early Cistercian examples, many are even more sleek and show only one leaf-like form. They are worth looking at closely, since they often reveal that typical Cistercian finesse. All the more interesting the contrast to this Romantic example from Banja Luka Abbey in in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  

First off, text almost never appears in medieval Cistercian capitals, nor do such figural representations. 

Daniel S. Berman (a student at the Graduate Center, CUNY) spoke about this image as one point in his 2026 Kalamazoo paper titled "Fragrance Sweeter than Wine: Sensorial Devotion to Christ’s Side-wound in a Fourteenth-century Cistercian Miscellany." He explained the representation of the dulce vulnus with the text wrapped around it. The Cistercian nuns praying with this manuscript looked at the life-sized image in the course of their spiritual exercises. They even documented medicinal healing which resulted from Sacred Heart devotions. The image is from the "Villers Miscellany" (KBR MS 4459–70, Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels). It was written by various scribes at the monastery of Villers, but was probably used by the nuns at Vrouwenpark.
There are a few articles on this striking image, most notably: Sara Ritchey, "The Wound's Presence and Bodily Absence: Activating the Spiritual Senses in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript," Sensory Reflections. Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, edt. Fiona Griffiths and Kathryn Starkey, (De Gruyter, 2019) 163-180.