There are stories so painful, so terrifying, so true, that they can only be about children. When they are packaged as such, we call them fairy tales. When they are made for and by adults, we sometimes call them horror films. Edmund Burke once argued Read More …
Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I would reply: Create silence! The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. Read More …
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world. What can be shown, cannot be said. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” –Ludwig Wittgenstein In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus the great twentieth century philosophy Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to define the limits Read More …
At the beginning of Paul Schrader’s elegant take on contemporary Christian spirituality in the mode of classic transcendental cinema, a very faint white cross appears in the title card between First and Reformed. As the sun rises over the shot, the cross resolves glimmering on the steeple of Read More …
“Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.” The cinema of Robert Bresson is difficult to crystallize, but the great director himself came close with these words. The rhythm of a Bresson film has one purpose—to uncover, layer by layer, the effervescent connections Read More …
Across the 16 years that Arts & Faith has been making Top 100 lists, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) has always been well-represented. This film has made every list, while earlier iterations have included Rashomon, Dersu Uzala, and/or Ran. Had we not imposed a “one film per director” rule, Read More …
Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne—popularly known as “the Dardenne brothers”—make genuine cinematic parables. By “parable” I mean films about ordinary or mundane circumstances which have no ostensible religious or sacred element, yet prove to provoke a sense of the transcendent, what philosopher Paul Ricoeur Read More …
Can Christians and Muslims coexist in peace today? Xavier Beauvois’ sublime fact-based drama about seven French Trappist monks in northern Algeria in the 1990s during the Algerian Civil War explores the question without offering a definitive answer. Led by Dom Christian (Lambert Wilson), the monks Read More …
How does one adequately describe a poem, a prayer, and a visual odyssey in mere prose? This is the challenge when attempting to capture the cinema of Terrence Malick in words. A work of cosmic praise and lament, Malick’s 2011 Palme d’Or-winning film, The Tree of Read More …
In the spirituality of the Christian East, icons are sometimes described as “windows into heaven.” Even when they depict earthly events, their stylized approach is meant to evoke transcendent realities. Such transcendence in art is both the subject and the method of Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunting, Read More …