Arts & Faith is a free, online forum devoted to discussion of movies, music, and (occasionally) most other art forms. In addition to lively discussions of the art of the day, the forum sponsors an Ecumenical Jury that annually recognizes the films it recommends specifically for viewers of faith. Its members also try to preserve and promote interest in the great films of all ages by periodically publishing its list of 100 films its members deem "Spiritually Significant."
Now in its sixth iteration, the Arts & Faith Top 100 has wrestled from its beginning with how to articulate what makes a movie “spiritually significant.” For much of the forum’s history, that admittedly ambiguous label may have been used simply to avoid the baggage accompanying other possible descriptors such as “moral,” “religious,” or even, “Christian.” In this list “spiritually significant” is meant to convey at least one of two qualities: a film that evokes spiritual contemplation, or a film that has been particularly significant in the moral and spiritual development of one of the voters.
Over 350 films were nominated by members of the Arts & Faith forum. Following weeks of discussion, we eventually whittled the list down to 100 finalists, but we were not satisfied with the results. Previous lists had capped the number of films by the same director at three. Despite adjusting that cap to two films and adding a brief supplemental round of nominations to encourage more diversity, we found the list was still too white, too male, too straight, and too American. I am all those things, as are most of the participants at Arts & Faith. Even so, if we wanted the list to reflect something more than our personal tastes and individual preferences, some introspection was in order.
We voted to change the cap to one representative film per director, clearing space for 17 more films, including great works from Mexico, China, Taiwan, Romania, Israel, and Mauritania. That meant letting go of some films about which we were passionate, a part of the process which was both the most painful and the most revealing. We were keeping Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Bergman (who had eight different films nominated!), and the Dardennes. But for the first time ever, the list would go into the world without A Man Escaped, The Son, or The Passion of Joan of Arc. I have long understood in the abstract that representation matters but experiencing firsthand what it feels like to have strongly held personal passions take a backseat to community consensus was an object lesson in what privilege really means.
Do I like our list? Yes, I do. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot. But it is a step in the right direction, and one which I am proud to have helped curate. What follows are three key reflections prompted by the results.
Canons are Established Over Time
There are 20 films that have made all six of Arts & Faith’s Top 100 lists. As representatives of beloved auteurs, some of them are not at all surprising: Ordet, Andrei Rublev, Diary of a Country Priest, and The Seventh Seal. Others are overtly religious in their themes and thus not hard to explain. Movies are somehow important to us when we are young. I suspect the differing generations at Arts & Faith could be somewhat easily discerned and divided by their respective affections and preferences for A Man for All Seasons, Chariots of Fire, and Magnolia. But how to explain the enduring love for Close-Up, Abbas Kiarostami’s chronicle of an Iranian conman impersonating Mohsen Makhmalbaf? How has It’s a Wonderful Life somehow escaped the repeated modern attempts to dismiss it as insignificant and trite? Why do members insist, year in and year out, that their favorite Jesus film was the one made by an openly gay, Italian Marxist better known for his pornographic adaptations of Sade and Boccaccio? Why is Rohmer and not Godard the embraced representative of the French New Wave?
It is an undeniable lesson of this experience that canons are self-perpetuating. Many of these works continue to be beloved because those who join the community are instructed (overtly or indirectly) that they are badges of tribal identification. Ponette and My Night at Maud’s are hard films to find once you have decided that you want to watch them. Their greatness would endure even if they fell off a special-interest list. But one of the only remaining positive powers the film critic has is that of waving his or her hands at the crowds marching into manufactured entertainments and pointing in the direction of smaller films struggling to capture and retain an audience.
Moving Beyond the Boy’s Club
There are six films in the Top 100 that were directed by women: The House is Black, The Gleaners & I, Beau travail, Lourdes, Cameraperson, and Selma. Christine Cynn is listed as one of three co-directors for The Act of Killing, and my colleague Darren Hughes insists that if Heartbeat Detector were made today Elisabeth Perceval would likely be acknowledged as a co-director. That is approximately seven percent, which is double the representation on the 2011 Top 100 but is still, bluntly, not good enough.
After the first round of voting, I asked voters via e-mail to send me a list of ten titles of just films by women that they thought were “spiritually significant.” Within days, we had a working list at the site of over 80 films that we could encourage each other and new members to consider…for next time. We considered scrapping the list and starting over – too impractical. We also considered having multiple lists, but I could not persuade myself that separate but equal was the right way to go. As a literature professor who went through graduate school in the 90s, I’ve always been persuaded by the argument that canons (or classes) just for female authors should only ever be a first step, that parallel lists or canons give an easy out for the traditionalist who doesn’t want to be bothered. Let “them” (whoever they are) have their classes and lists over in the Women’s Studies program….and let “us” keep our white, male, straight, canon as the primary instruments of cultural dissemination. If diversity is ever achieved, it needs to be an organic unity that emerges from consensus and not an engineered result of (to steal a metaphor from Dallas Willard) going around tying fruit to trees in order to make them look more alive than they really are.
There was another reason, at least for me, why the women’s list was so disturbing. I expected it to be populated with esoteric films about which I was previously unaware. (I had seen over 90% of the 350+ nominations for the main list, so I pride myself in having a broad range of film knowledge.) While there were some titles that were new to me, I was struck by how many were films I already esteemed. “Why didn’t I nominate any of these?” one voter asked rhetorically when giving me the requested bevy of titles by women directors. I felt the same way. Persepolis is listed on my Letterboxd profile as one of my four favorite films but did not make it onto my list of 25 nominations because…why? Barbara Kopple is my virtue-signaling answer when asked for a short-list of my favorite directors, and yet I passed over her films in an ill-fated attempt to try to jump-start discussions about Leni Riefenstahl? I only fell in love with the films of Céline Sciamma last year, but where was the push for Lone Scherfig, Kelly Riechardt, Jane Campion, Mira Nair? Each have made films I have dutifully and honestly put on one of my annual Top 10 lists but were somehow easily looked past in my attempts to make a shortlist. Thank goodness another voter nominated Jessica Hausner’s film Lourdes or I would have some serious explaining to do!
The creation of the “women’s” list immediately prompted overdue discussion at the forum when one member asked that The Matrix and Cloud Atlas be included. Was this a list of films by ciswomen only? (I had to look up the term.) As far as films that made the Top 100, there simply are not any high-profile representations of LGBTQ+ characters. The homoerotic subtext of Melville’s Billy Budd remains in Beau travail, and James Baldwin’s sexual orientation is not exactly a secret to audiences of I Am Not Your Negro. I suppose one could try to make a claim that the romance in Blade Runner is something other than heterosexual. But despite various voters championing Love is Strange or Carol or The Celluloid Closet, “gay” films are still on the outside looking in. As dissatisfying as the explanation might be, I think viewers preferred to sidestep human sexuality as a topic entirely. I nominated Eyes Wide Shut thinking the list should have at least a few films that grappled with the implications that our spirits are embodied in…well…bodies. It came in ranked 201, just below the Truffaut’s 400 Blows and one spot above the C. S. Lewis biopic, Shadowlands.
In terms of geographic and racial diversity, the list does slightly better. For the first time, the Top 100 features a film by Spike Lee, with Do The Right Thing cracking the Top 10. Raoul Peck’s lesser known but equally powerful I Am Not Your Negro joins Ava DuVernay’s Selma and Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger as welcome additions to the Arts & Faith canon. Over half of the films on the list are non-American, non-English language, or both. While the list is still more Christian than anything else, voters are increasingly making space for films by and about Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists.
Do Lists Like This Matter?
They matter to me. And I would guess that if you are still reading at this point, they must matter at least a little to you as well. This version of this list has been especially meaningful to me because it is my first time through the process as leader of the forum and because of the global pandemic that raged around us as we created it.
Being asked to stay at home or shelter in place has, on the one hand, provided a captive audience of cinephiles with a bit more time than usual to devote to movie watching. On the other hand, there has been a bittersweet quality to the whole enterprise. The passions and energy with which voters have shared their thoughts have served as a reminder that watching film used to be (and still ought to be) a communal experience. During the deliberations for the Top 100, I was able to participate in a Zoom call with many of the forum members. Some of those on the call were people with whom I have had, literally, thousands of online interactions with over the last 15 years despite never having met in person. I was reminded of just how differently we can behave online versus our response to the “other” when we can look him or her in the face, hear his or her voice. That’s something I have thought a lot about over those 15 years, especially when watching the films of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne—artists I probably would not know were it not for the community at Arts & Faith welcoming me to the table.
Let that final reflection serve double duty as an invitation. If you think the best part about watching movies is the discussion that follows…join us. If the list is full of names and titles that are foreign to you…join us. If you think the list would be so much better if only it included that movie from long ago that you have never been able to shake…join us. Great art feeds our spirits, and we are all very hungry right now.
Kenneth R. Morefield is a Professor of English at Campbell University. He is the editor of Faith and Spirituality In Masters of World Cinema (Vol. 1-3) and the author of Jane Austen's Emma: A Close Reading Companion.
