Spiritual Cinema
"Movies containing spiritual, metaphysical, conscious or similar messages or themes".
Simon Keyes explains the idea behind Spiritual Cinema.
It is the extraordinary power of cinema, high or low, serious and exploitative, to move and disturb us that we should celebrate and embrace in all its diversity. Films can fertilise our inner lives and provide a counter-balance to that compartmentalisation of our "religious" selves that Thomas Merton dubbed our "personal holiness project". The feelings and shadows that films (well, perhaps not quite every movie) incarnate in us give us privileged access to the world beyond our immediate experience. The sights and sounds of cinema can resonate in the realms of the unconscious and the archetypal like no other medium, and there is much for us to learn about ourselves in this experience.
Below is a list of "the best of" this genre...
Dersu Uzala (1975)
8.3/10
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Yuri Solomon, Maxim Munzuk
Kurosawa's remarkable, personal tale of the friendship between a wise old man and a young Soviet explorer, filmed in the beautiful expanse of Siberia,... Read more
Dersu Uzala (Blu-ray) (1975)
8.2/10
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Yuri Solomon, Maxim Munzuk
Kurosawa's remarkable, personal tale of the friendship between a wise old man and a young Soviet explorer, filmed in the beautiful expanse of Siberia,... Read more
The Mirror (1974)
8.1/10
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Margarita Terekhova, Philip Yankovsky
Effortlessly blending past and present, dreams, subjective reminiscence and a wider overview of 20th Century Russian history, Andrei Tarkovsky creates... Read more
Soylent Green (1973)
7.1/10
Director: Richard Fleischer
Starring: Brock Peters, Charlton Heston, Chuck Connors, Edward G Robinson, Joseph Cotten,...
This frighteningly prescient sci-fi tale about the dangers of the "greenhouse effect" was made long before the term became a popular buzzword. Charlto... Read more
Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973)
6/10
Director: Hall Bartlett
Based on the popular book by Richard Bach, this warm and exhilarating film traces the life of a flock of seagulls, and of one bird in particular who l... Read more
Siddhartha (1972)
6.7/10
Director: Conrad Rooks
Starring: Shashi Kapoor, Simi Garewal
From the Nobel Prize-winning novel by Herman Hesse ("Steppenwolf"), "Siddhartha" is the story of a young Brahmin who leaves his wealthy parents to bec... Read more
Cries and Whispers (1972)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, Kari Sylwan
One of writer/director Ingmar Bergman's most acclaimed films, 'Cries and Whispers' is a dramatically intense story set in a vast manor house in rural... Read more
Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972)
7.2/10
Director: Franco Zeffirelli
Starring: Alec Guinness, Graham Faulkner, Judi Bowker, Leigh Lawson
Franco Zeffirelli relates the tale of St. Francis of Assisi, an Italian soldier who returns from the Crusades and dismisses his family's material weal... Read more
Harold and Maude ( Blu-ray ) (1971)
8/10
Director: Hal Ashby
Starring: Bud Cort, Cyril Cusack, Ruth Gordon, Vivian Pickles
With the idiosyncratic American fable "Harold and Maude", countercultural director Hal Ashby fashioned what would become the cult classic of its era.... Read more
A Clockwork Orange ( Blu-ray ) (1971)
8.3/10
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Adrienne Corri, Miriam Karlin
Stanley Kubrick's dark, dazzling, ironic tale of an ultra-violent future filled with marauding gangs, decaying cities and bizarre technologies. Follow... Read more