The Lists Project

[Mr Sausage]

Don't forget Bresson.

Or Bunuel, for that matter. The Milky Way is an amazing religious satire (not that Simon of the Desert or Viridiana are anything to sneer at).

[knives]

Rossellini too has a number of films that surely qualify.

[Michael Kerpan]

Would animated mini-series count? (if so, the five-hour long Haibane Renmei would make my list).

Other "religious" films by Bunuel -- El (to a considerable degree) and Nazarin.

Kore'eda's After Life would be a contender.

Ant then there are overtly ANTI-religious films -- like Rivette's adaptation of Diderot -- Les Religieuse.

[swo17]

Animated films and miniseries are always eligible.

[zedz]

What I find intriguing about this suggestion is that I don't think I could sit down and brainstorm a list of 'favourite religious films' - at least, not with any consistency or efficiency. It's not an 'active' category for me. So I imagine that in compiling such a list I'd probably have to go through my decades lists film by film and interrogate each one: "Is this a religious film? Is this a religious film?"

I'm sure it would be a thought-provoking discussion. And, if people are interested, we could always initiate a 'Favourite Religious Films' thread without launching a full-fledged list project (yet).

[domino harvey]

There's this and, alternately, this...

Can't imagine anything other than the Song of Bernadette being my number one, and given that not a single other person even bothered to vote for it in the Forties List, I can't say I'm optimistic about participation levels for this... Other great titles that would near the top of my provisional list and take a more complicated look at faith are the Shoes of the Fisherman and Don't Look Now

[colinr0380]

Animated films and miniseries are always eligible.

I'm glad to hear it because one of my favourite 'religious' films would have to be the alternate history anime The Wings of Honneamise, which is primarily about one man's dream of flying airplanes (which gets dashed in the opening pre-credit monologue, which always manages to make me shed a tear in the economic way that it shows a youthful person's dreams fall away), with him instead getting pushed into his country's space programme, which is considered a dangerous national joke. The whole film is about him preparing to become the first man in space but it also throws in a subplot in which the hero gets involved with a very religious woman who sends him into a theological (and sexual) crisis.

Spoiler

The climax of the whole film is the first successful space mission into orbit, with the main character praying in his space capsule before we get an enormously ambitious montage of human history showing the sheer human effort behind all of these large scale advancements - the tiny and individual moments set against the huge grand projects and 'religious' statements that try to unify people.

[Saturnome]

There's this top 100 of "spiritually significant films". Though I don't understand how some of them qualify. Playtime?

[swo17]

They've extended spirituality to encompass a "sublime expression of humane values," which I can see as an explanation for Make Way for Tomorrow or Paths of Glory, but several of those films still seem like a stretch.

There really doesn't seem to be a defined canon for this genre, which is part of the appeal for me I suppose.

[Minkin]

Great, now we're going to have to go to the Christian bookstore and sign up for some weekly class or something.

The sacrifices we make for you Swo.

At least they might still have some of those cool Bible NES games. I guess I'll just say that I add a concurring voice to the genre choice.

[knives]

Other great titles that would near the top of my provisional list and take a more complicated look at faith are ... Don't Look Now

Could you explain? I've never put any religious under or overtones into it.

[Mr Sausage]

They've extended spirituality to encompass a "sublime expression of humane values,"

Oh that's not very interesting. Spirituality can express anti-human values, too. I think I'd rather see that dealt with than the more sentimental version of spirituality.

Surprised Last Temptation of Christ didn't make that list. As for my own possible list, I think I might end up rating I Walked with a Zombie rather high. It's a fascinating account of how different people use or react to a totally alien form of worship, and how that form of worship ends up dragging to the surface all the rot latent in the colonists lives.

[Michael Kerpan]

There's this top 100 of "spiritually significant films". Though I don't understand how some of them qualify. Playtime?

I prefer the Vatican's 1995 list: http://old.usccb.org/movies/vaticanfilms.shtml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[duck duck]

I always found von Trier's Riget to be the most accessible of his experimental works,
and the Danish/Swedish makes it creepier... sorry Scandinavians... I would even put it
above Breaking the Waves because the psychology is more ratelateble.

[zedz]

Okay, I was bored and curious to see what would happen, so I attempted a rough-and-ready 'Religious Films' list and found I could get to 30 pretty easily. Some of these are films of faith and religion, some are about faith and religion, and some are the closest things to religious experiences that this atheist is ever going to get:

1. The Colour of Pomegranates (Paradzhanov)
2. A Man Escaped (Bresson)
3. Andrey Rublyov (Tarkovsky)
4. A Canterbury Tale (Powell / Pressburger)
5. The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (Brakhage)
6. Life and Nothing More (Kiarostami)
7. The Ossuary (Svankmajer)
8. Apotheosis (Lennon / Ono)
9. The Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
10. Mujo (Jissoji)
11. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
12. Simon of the Desert (Bunuel)
13. Medea (Pasolini)
14. The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami)
15. Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul)
16. Fuego en Castilla (Val del Omar)
17. Black God, White Devil (Rocha)
18. The Son (Dardennes)
19. The Profound Desire of the Gods (Imamura)
20. Death and Transfiguration (Davies)
21. Au Hasard Bathazar (Bresson)
22. Walkabout (Roeg)
23. The Decalogue (Kieslowski)
24. The Thin Red Line (Malick)
25. The Valley of the Bees (Vlacil)
26. In That Country (Bobrova)
27. To Sleep with Anger (Burnett)
28. The Cremator (Herz)
29. Stalker (Tarkovsky)
30. The Flowers of St Francis (Rossellini)

[swo17]

That's a fascinating list (filled to overflowing with great films, of course) and I suspect that the rationale behind including some of them could prove illuminatory in ways that aren't often considered in evaluation of these films. For instance, I imagine that you are including The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes for evoking something like a religious experience in your own personal viewing, but I could also see the film as allowing the viewer to see as God sees, as exposing something that only God was ever meant to see, or even as denying God by making the human body ignoble.

[Mr Sausage]

It's such a beguiling inclusion, the Brakhage film, because it's a film that is overwhelmingly materialistic in its concerns, which is usually the opposite of spirituality. And yet just seeing it on that list I get a sense of what zedz means when he calls it a religious or spiritual film. Now all that makes me want to do is hear more of zedz' thoughts on the religious/spiritual elements of the movie.

Again, it sucks that this one isn't our next genre project. It probably won't get as many contributions as the others, but the discussion will be fascinating.

[zedz]

Yeah, the Brakhage is probably the most religious film on that list. It's a religious film for atheists, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also operated the same way for believers. If God exists, he / she / it is in that film.

Apotheosis is probably the closest to a real "God's-eye-view" film on the list, but it also functions at the level of human revelation of the divine.

The Wind Will Carry Us is one big, mysterious spiritual metaphor, and I read Life and Nothing More along the same lines. Though in both cases, Kiarostami is artfully working on other metaphorical levels as well.

Death and Transfiguration is probably another religious film for atheists.

Some of the other films embody and internalize particular religious outlooks (e.g. Mujo) or handle religious subject matter sarcastically (e.g. The Cremator) or abstractly (e.g. The Ossuary), but their relationship to the matter at hand should be reasonably self-evident.

EDIT: Just to respond a bit more to Sausage's comments: if it's possible to photograph the absence of God, that's what Brakhage manages to do. And of course, the opposite also applies.

[Gregory]

Perhaps this is completely in agreement with you, zedz, as you've described the film photographing the absence of God, but I've been trying to understand your list and the inclusion of this film. To me, religion or "spirituality" means something superhuman, some higher power or "order," (a "macro" or metaphysical perspective) whereas "The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes" is one of the most viscerally human films I know of (a "micro," or experiential perspective of an artist self-conscious of his own presence in what was transpiring, struggling to process it, let alone capture something on a higher level). Brakhage's camera mediates the experience. He'd never seen dead human bodies before, and the filming made this seeing possible for him, but just barely, as he said later he could scarcely keep filming. The difference between an "external autopsy" following a death from natural causes (no cutting open) and what Brakhage then felt compelled to film -- the full exposure of bodies that died in violent circumstances -- seems far less urgent in the grand scheme of things, from the superhuman perspective, than it is for the involved human observer: that is, the coroner's technicians and, via the camera, Brakhage and us as viewers. For me anyway, this perspective that's all about human beings is what the film is about, and the title suggests this human act of the individual perspective. I'm not sure in what ways religious believers may see the film, but would be interested.

[matrixschmatrix]

It's about the spirit in that it is, in the most explicit way possible, a film about where the spirit is not- whatever animating force or soul or touch of the divine or whatever else those bodies once possessed, they are now defunct machines that can be taken apart or reassembled at will. It can be taken as a profoundly atheistic film- a sort of visceral (ahem) argument that this is what life really comprises, just this pile of stuff. It can also be a profound spiritual statement, either about the infinite distance between said pile of stuff and a living being, or even about the fascinating workmanship that has apparently gone into the making of all that stuff. It's an investigation into the inner workings of life, which is of course one of the purposes of any theosophical investigation.

On that note, one could consider Le sang des betes a perversely spiritual work, though what it says is far from complimentary.

[swo17]

There is I suppose a danger of calling any old film "religious" simply because you love it to the heavens (for instance, I have a difficult time describing Oskar Fischinger's Study No. 7 without evoking deity, though I don't really consider it a religious film). I think the main point might be whether a film causes you to reflect on religious matters or on the divine, and on those grounds, I can see Act of Seeing as fitting the bill. Though could the same be said for anything that looks unflinchingly at atrocity? For example, Night and Fog is obviously religious in a contextual sense, but leaving that aside, is the act of seeing the horrors inflicted on the Jewish people in and of itself religious?

[Mr Sausage]

is the act of seeing the horrors inflicted on the Jewish people in and of itself religious?

It could be, depending on your views of worship. I'm pretty sure there is at least one sect (of Christianity?) that believes the contemplation of suffering and misery can bring you closer to the divine. I find that idea off putting, tho', in the context of Night and Fog.

There is a difference between a film that contains religion and spirituality as its subject, and a film which doesn't but ends up, for whatever reason, causing this or that viewer to think of spirituality and religion. This divide is slippery, tho', and can easily allow people to list films that are religious to no other person simply because the experience is so overwhelming they consider that in itself spiritual.

[Murdoch]

The Act of Seeing may be the ultimate religious film experience since it forces the viewer to face his/her own beliefs and merely acts as a mirror to reflect whatever beliefs the viewer brings to the film. For example, someone I knew viewed the film as deeply religious in the sense that it portrayed the absence of the soul, and how the body becomes lifeless because an essential element has been removed, with these lifeless corpses seeming to be no different from any other inanimate object. The film seeks to show rather than to tell and there's something spiritual in the title itself, like a profound experience of self awakening is being filmed that has an effect on any viewer who watches it.

[Yojimbo]

Okay, I was bored and curious to see what would happen, so I attempted a rough-and-ready 'Religious Films' list and found I could get to 30 pretty easily. Some of these are films of faith and religion, some are about faith and religion, and some are the closest things to religious experiences that this atheist is ever going to get:

1. The Colour of Pomegranates (Paradzhanov)
2. A Man Escaped (Bresson)
3. Andrey Rublyov (Tarkovsky)
4. A Canterbury Tale (Powell / Pressburger)
5. The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (Brakhage)
6. Life and Nothing More (Kiarostami)
7. The Ossuary (Svankmajer)
8. Apotheosis (Lennon / Ono)
9. The Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
10. Mujo (Jissoji)
11. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
12. Simon of the Desert (Bunuel)
13. Medea (Pasolini)
14. The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami)
15. Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul)
16. Fuego en Castilla (Val del Omar)
17. Black God, White Devil (Rocha)
18. The Son (Dardennes)
19. The Profound Desire of the Gods (Imamura)
20. Death and Transfiguration (Davies)
21. Au Hasard Bathazar (Bresson)
22. Walkabout (Roeg)
23. The Decalogue (Kieslowski)
24. The Thin Red Line (Malick)
25. The Valley of the Bees (Vlacil)
26. In That Country (Bobrova)
27. To Sleep with Anger (Burnett)
28. The Cremator (Herz)
29. Stalker (Tarkovsky)
30. The Flowers of St Francis (Rossellini)

I can't believe you forgot 'Nazarin'????

[zedz]

I can't believe you forgot 'Nazarin'????

I didn't forget it, I just don't like it as much as the Rossellini. And Exterminating Angel is already ahead of it in the queue. There were a heap of eligible Bunuels, but Simon is so perfect and concise that it did everything I needed in a top 30.