Arts & Faith's Top 100 Films

When Image Journal published its Top 100 Books of the Century, it became my reading list for over a year. Their refreshing selections from 100 different authors manifested “a genuine engagement with the Judeo-Christian heritage of faith, rather than merely using religion as background or subject matter.” Image included some of my then-favorites like Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. These writers wrestled honestly with faith, and the list led me to read Frederic Beuchner’s Godric, G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Shusaku Endo’s Silence, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies and Walter Wangerin Jr.’s The Book of Dun Cow. Quite a few of those came on a two-week trip to Kenya, Uganda, the Ukraine and Italy in September of 2001, a time when faith was as necessary as ever.

So, I was very interested to learn this morning that Arts & Faith, the forum hosted at Image Journal, has released it’s Top 100 Films. Some, like The Decalogue, Magnolia, The Bicycle Thief, Wings of Desire, The Apostle and Jesus of Montreal were already among my favorites. Others like Babette’s Feast, Beau Travail, The Son and Syndromes and a Century were already in my Netflix queue. But many more were unfamiliar to me, including the Number 1 pick, Ordet, a 1955 Danish film from Carl Theodor Dreyer.

I look forward to discovering the films that touched the members of the Arts & Faith forum. If the film recommendations are half as good as the books, I’m in for months of discovery.

The Top 25 (click here for the full list)
1. Ordet (The Word)
2. The Decalogue (Dekalog)
3. Babette’s Feast (Babettes gæstebud)
4. The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc)
5. The Son (Le Fils)
6. Au Hasard Balthazar
7. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
8. Andrei Rublev (Andrey Rublyov)
9. Early Summer (Bakushu)
10. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Il vangelo secondo Matteo)
11. Diary of a Country Priest (Le journal d’un curé de campagne)
12. Wings of Desire (Der Himmel uber Berlin)
13. The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet)
14. Ikiru (To Live)
15. Three Colors Trilogy (Trois couleurs)
16. The Mirror (Zerkalo) 66 By Brakhage: An Anthology
17. Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Apu Sansar)
18. Floating Weeds (Ukigusa)
19. Munyurangabo
20. The Burmese Harp
21. Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari)
22. A Serious Man
23. My Night at Maud’s (Ma nuit chez Maud)
24. Into Great Silence (Die Grosse Stille)
25. Nostalghia